What information is available?
England, Wales and Northern Ireland
The information you can find in parish registers is very variable. Names may have been spelled phonetically and entries prior to 1733, when English became the official language, might have been written in Latin.
Scotland
Before the introduction of compulsory civil registration in 1855, the parish ministers or session clerks of the established Church of Scotland in some 900 parishes kept registers, which record births and baptisms; proclamations of banns and marriages; and deaths and burials. The surviving registers, now approximately 3,500 in number, are far from complete. Though the oldest register relates to baptisms and banns at Errol in Perthshire in 1553, for some parishes the earliest register Religious records from the early 19th century, and for other parishes there are no registers at all. The standard of record-keeping also varied considerably from parish to parish and from year to year, and most entries contain relatively little information. Find out more about the history of registration in Scotland on the GROS website
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Information that might be found for a:
Baptism
A standard form was introduced in England and Wales in 1812 which required that the following information be recorded:
- Date of baptism
- Child’s Christian name
- Family name
- Parents’ Christian names
- Family address
- Father’s occupation
- Name of the person conducting the ceremony.
Generally, less information was recorded before 1812.
In Scotland much less information is generally given - in some entries the mother’s name is not recorded at all.
The General Register Office for Scotland has a wonderful page of “genealogical gems” on its website recording some of the quirky and funny notes written in parish records.
In the records held in the British Library India Office collections the names of the godparents were also given occasionally.
Marriage
As with baptisms, the information collected is very variable. In England and Wales before 1754, often only the names of the bride and groom were noted along with the date. Sometimes only the groom’s name was recorded.
The marriage act of 1753 said that in England and Wales the following information had to be recorded (from 1754)
- Names of the bride and groom
- Date
- Place - this had to be a parish church or licensed chapel* in which the banns had been called
- Whether the marriage was by banns or licence
- That consent had been given by the parents if either of the couple were under the age of 21
- Signatures of the minister performing the marriage, the bride and groom and two witnesses
- Marital status of bride and groom
- names of witnesses
- from 1837
*From 1 July 1837 the following information was also collected:
- Current address of bride and groom
- Names and occupations of the fathers of the bride and groom
The marriage act of 1753 was also significant because it stated that a marriage was only legitimate if it was carried out in an Anglican Church where banns had been called or a licence granted. If your English and Welsh ancestors worshipped outside the Anglican church, see the Non-Conformist Registers chapter.
In Scotland, the Marriage Act 1753 did not apply and a marriage was legally valid (though regarded as ‘irregular’ by the Church of Scotland if promises had been mutually exchanged before witnesses.
The parish registers in Scotland in fact often record proclamations of banns prior to marriage, rather than the marriages themselves, and generally record only the bride and groom’s name, and date of proclamations (and sometimes marriages), Sometimes the bride’s father’s name, names of witnesses and groom’s occupation or territorial designation will be included.
Burial
Parish registers can contain the following information on burials.
- Full name of deceased
- Date of death
- Place of death
- Age (from 1866)
- Cause of death
- Occupation
- Signature, title and address of the person who registered the death.
- Date of registration
- Signature of registrar
Scottish parish registers generally include no more than:
- Name of deceased
- Date of burial
