The information they give can vary enormously; the registers of many of the City of London parishes will provide quite detailed entries. However some will only provide only the briefest of information. For example, the majority of burial registers for the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and parts of the Eighteenth centuries will not give an age at death and/or occupation. Many marriage registers for those centuries will only give the names of the bride and groom.

The same applies to baptismal registers, most just give the date, name of the child and parents names. To obtain details of their trade and or occupations and other information you will have to carry out searches in ancillary sources, such as marriage bonds and allegations, banns registers, wills and administrations plus monumental inscriptions.

Most of the registers will end in 1858 but some may continue much later. If that is not the case with the parish in which you are interested then you should approach the local minister and ask for permission to search the registers post 1858. The name and address and telephone number of the local minister can be obtained from the current edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory.

If you are unable to trace the baptism of your ancestor in the Anglican registers, you should then search the Non-Conformist registers that cover that parish. These are held by the Public Record Office at Kew and, in most cases, end in 1837.

In the event that your ancestor was a Quaker, then you must consult the registers of Quarterly and Monthly Meetings held at Friends House Library, Euston Road, London. If they were Roman Catholics, you should consult the registers held at the Public Record Office. However, most catholic registers are still held in local custody, in which case you should consult current edition of The Catholic Directory for the name address and telephone number of the present priest.

The format used in parish registers post 1812 differs greatly from those prior to that date.

Before 1812 the format is much more haphazard and in many cases difficult to read. After 1812 it is much easier to read the information contained therein. For example post 1812 baptism, marriages and burials are all listed separately but prior to that many are all mixed up in a general register.

In theory, all parish registers should begin in 1538, however many begin at a much later date. In order to overcome this difficulty you should determine if there are any surviving bishops or archdeacon's transcripts; they will be held at the local record office. If the register does not give and age at death, then determine if the monumental inscriptions in the church and churchyard have been transcribed.

Your ancestor's immediate family may have raised an inscription to their memory on which the age at death is given. The Society of Genealogists in London have many such transcriptions for England & Wales.

Helpful Hints

1) Initially you should search the period 1750 to 1858 and list all references to the surname you are interested in. This way you will be able to produce a pedigree chart, which lists all the known relatives of your ancestor.

2) In the event that you find more than more baptism entry for a person with the same name as your ancestor, search the burial registers to see if one has died an infant. If this proves successful then you can confidently accept the remaining entry as relating to your ancestor.

3) If you do not find an entry for your ancestor, try searching any Non-Conformist/Catholic/Quaker registers that may have survived for that parish. If that is also unsuccessful, determine if there is a baptismal index for the county and have it searched.

4) Burial Indexes for individual counties are also available. If you cannot find a burial for your ancestor in the parish in which he was born and or married, try searches in the aforementioned.

Burke's Peerage & Gentry
the complete reference guide
to the UK and Ireland's
titled and landed families

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