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Search 36,293 new Montgomeryshire parish records on findmypast.co.uk

We have just added 36,293 parish records for Montgomeryshire to the site. The details of the new records are as follows:

• Baptisms: 1593-1939: 19,407 new records
• Marriages: 1591-1837: 1,757 new records
• Burials: 1574-1940: 15,129 new records

Search our parish records for your ancestors.

This data was provided by the Montgomeryshire Genealogical Society.

Nearly 205,000 new baptism and burial records added to the site

We have added a total of 204,501 new baptism and burial records for Wiltshire, Manchester and Dorset to findmypast.co.uk.

These records were provided by the Wiltshire Family History Society, the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society and the Dorset Family History Society.

See the table below for a breakdown of the records:

Visit our parish baptisms and parish burials pages to search these records.

Parish records list alphabetised

The Knowledge Base section of our site contains our Parish Records Collection. We’ve just alphabetised the parish list so finding the one you need should now be much easier. Have a look at our parish list now.

City of London Burial Index records update

We have just added over 50,000 new City of London Burial Index records to findmypast.co.uk. The records are for St Andrew Holborn church for the period 1754-1812. You can view these records within the parish records collection on our site.

The original City of London Burial Index was created by Cliff Webb and produced by the West Surrey Family History Society in 1991 and re-issued in 1997. It contains details from 75 of the 98 churches within the City of London.

Find out more on our City of London Burials page.

Ask the Expert – Bournemouth Blues

Our expert Stephen Rigden answers your questions:

After receiving a copy of my great-grandmother’s death certificate I thought it would be an easy thing to find her burial place so that I can visit from Australia next year. However, I have come up against a problem I have no idea how to tackle – I am unfamiliar with the areas around Bournemouth and with the changes to Hampshire and Dorset boundaries so do not know where to begin.

She died in Winton, Hampshire in 1903 from the effects of TB at aged 32 – her name was Ellen Dean (nee Boyt), wife of Charles. I have made enquiries with libraries but there is no record of her burial in the Bournemouth area and I am at a loss to know where to try – surely there must be a register which would record all burials for the County? Any advice would be gratefully received.’ Kris

Steve says:”Unfortunately, no! There are no such things as countywide burial registers in England and Wales.

Registration of deaths occurs locally at district register offices, with records then being collated centrally into a nationwide index. It is true that in civil registration there is an ongoing move towards unitary authorities sited at county level: for example, Kent County Council has a single countywide Registration Services portal. However, this does not apply to burials and cremations.

Unlike deaths, burials have never been regarded by the state as a vital event requiring systematic registration of date and place. Therefore, once a death has been registered, and assuming certain regulations are followed, burial can take place in a cemetery (or other approved location) of one’s choice.

Back in 1903, therefore, your late great grandmother’s death was registered in Christchurch registration district, which covered both Winton and Bournemouth. This is the only guide to place of burial that you have: most burials take place close to the locality of residence and death where these are the same. However, it is not hard to imagine situations where these general guidelines are broken. For example, if a person died far from their usual place of abode (for instance, while on holiday, or travelling), they may have been buried not near the place of death but back in their home district. Similarly, it is not unusual for a person who left their home town to be buried back there, especially if all other family remained in that location. Of course, neither of these scenarios may apply in your case, but do check on the death certificate for any addresses given for the deceased and/or the informant.

If it does seem that your great grandmother both lived and died in the Christchurch registration district area, you find yourself in a position shared by many genealogists: you know where an ancestor died but you will have to search speculatively to try to identify the place of burial. It was precisely to help out researchers in your predicament that the Federation of Family History Societies embarked upon its ongoing National Burial Index (NBI) project. A version of the NBI is online, containing 13 million entries, at Find My Past and can be found at http://www.findmypast.co.uk/parish-records-collection-search-start.action?redef=0&event=D. Currently, however, there are only limited records for Hampshire and, unfortunately, none of relevance to you.

This leaves you with only one option: to identify all the municipal and church burial grounds in the area active in 1903 and to eliminate them one by one, working out from the centre to more distant locations. As you are based in Australia and do not benefit from local knowledge, I suggest that your best step would be to contact the relevant family history society, in this instance Hampshire Genealogical Society for advice. Their contact page http://www.hgs-online.org.uk/contacts.htm includes email addresses for local organisers. They may also be able to recommend a local expert willing to undertake enquiries upon your behalf; such searches may be necessary at the County Record Office and could take in funeral notices in local newspapers for the two weeks after death, as well as burial registers.

Finally, as a word of caution, it is worth noting that if and when you successfully identify the place of burial, it is possible that you will find no surviving headstone in situ – one may not have been raised in the first place, or it may have become weathered and damaged over time. In this regard, those local authorities most mindful of health and safety regulations often lay down headstones which they deem to be dangerous.”

We hope this is useful to your research. If you would like to pose a question for Steve, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

Memorial inscriptions: almost 1 million records added

Findmypast.com, in partnership with the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS), has added nearly a million new memorial inscriptions to its Parish Records Collection. These records are the fruits of decades of transcription work by family historians nationwide.

Volunteers from different societies have visited graveyards and cemeteries in England and Wales, pulling back weeds, uncovering buried headstones and patiently deciphering weathered inscriptions.

In some cases the transcription is the only record that is left, as the headstone has completely weathered away or been destroyed.

The newly added records cover the following counties:

• Dorset
• Essex
• Glamorgan
• Lincolnshire
• Cheshire
• Northumberland
• Somerset
• Warwickshire
• Wiltshire

It is an ongoing project and there is still lots more work to do. If you would like to get involved, then contact your local family history society.

The records contain inscriptions from the 1600s to the twentieth century and will appear as part of the results when you search for a burial within the Parish Records Collection.

Some contain basic information such as parish and date of death, whereas others may contain much more information, depending on what was written on the headstone, and how much has survived the ravages of time.

Pricing for inscriptions for those with PayAsYouGo credits is either six, eight or 12 credits, depending on the amount of detail they contain.