Searching Berkshire Parish Registers
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page reviewed and revised 20 April 2012
Introduction to parish registers
Two key dates in your research are 1 July 1837 - when civil registration started in England & Wales - and 6 June 1841 - when, for the first time on that particular census night, the national census collected names and some limited personal information of every person in the household. But if you need to search before 1837, what resources can you use?
To find your ancestors before 1837, or to learn more about people born or who married before that date, you must turn to parish records as your key resource. While many different parish records survive, Church of England parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials are your starting point. The earliest registers date from 1538 (but many parishes did not begin to keep records until much later) and registers are kept to this day, offering valuable information for research.
Registers of baptisms are particularly important. In the early period of civil registration (from July 1837 to 1875), it is estimated that up to 15 per cent of births went unrecorded in some areas (for a variety of different reasons). The baptismal record thus remains a key record even during the early years of civil registration.
Parish registers that are more than 100 years old should now be safely deposited in the relevant diocesan archive, usually the County Record Office (CRO) or its metropolitan equivalent. For all of pre-1974 Berkshire (inluding the parishes of North Berkshire and the Vale of the White Horse), the original registers and other parish documents are held at Berkshire Record Office in Reading.
Finding your ancestor in church records can be much less straightforward than searching for them in civil registration and census records. You need to know how to make intelligent use of the available finding aids and indexes to parish registers. And you need to be able to use other research resources that can help you to find the right parish register for your needs.
What transcriptions and indexes are available? And how readily can you use them?
