Findmypast.co.uk has released over 290,000 new parish records going back the the sixteenth century covering Warwickshire, Sheffield, Suffolk and Rugby. The records provide essential plugs to gaps in the records and may prove vital in enabling you to trace your ancestors. Have a look at the detail in the table below:

Search our parish records now

Following last week’s launch of our fantastic new marriage records search, MarriageFinder^TM, we’ve found some interesting names in our records. They just go to show that when taking a partner ‘for better or worse’, an embarrassing married name doesn’t put everyone off…

Here is a selection of the names we found in the records:

• Holly Oakes
• Eileen Dover
• Hazel Nut
• Queenie King
• Mona Lott
• Jean Pool
• Joy Rider
• Lily Pond
• Anita Bath
• Candy Barr
• Kerry Oakey

Keeping up with the Mary Christmases

It seems that a large number of Marys have continued the Christmas theme with their name and married someone with the festive surname, Christmas. There are over 50 Mary Christmases in our marriage records - the earliest recorded Mary Christmas married in 1837 in Alton, Hampshire, losing the maiden name of Cannon.

Where for art thou?

We’ve discovered a pair of real star-crossed lovers in the marriage records: in 1971, a Romeo married a Juliet in Lambeth, London. We also found the marriage records of Oscar Fingal Wilde and Constance Lloyd in Kensington, London in 1884, Jude Law and Sadie Frost in Westminster, London in 1997 and Kate Winslet and Jim Threapleton, in Reading, Berkshire in 1998.

With this record I thee wed

Our research found that the most popular county to get married in was Lancashire, with 11.66 million records listed between 1837 and 2005. London followed closely behind with 11.62 million.

The five most popular towns to be married in were:

1. Birmingham, Warwickshire: 1,656,516 records
2. Manchester, Lancashire: 1,127,584 records
3. Sheffield, Yorkshire: 988,541 records
4. Leeds, Yorkshire: 980,207 records
5. Bristol, Somerset: 899,885 records

Our marketing manager, Debra Chatfield (pictured), said:

“As the first company to publish birth, marriage and death records online, findmypast.co.uk has always been committed to making family history research more accessible. This brand new way of searching the marriage records is a major breakthrough in family history enabling people to find their ancestors’ marriages more quickly and easily than ever before by using our revolutionary new tool MarriageFinder^TM. Thanks to initiatives like this, family history is more popular than ever and we hope that we can help even more people to start uncovering their family’s past.”

Debra Chatfield, findmypast.co.uk's marketing manager

When you search our marriage records, MarriageFinder^TM will match up your ancestors’ records, providing you in many cases with one definite marriage match, or a list of possible matches.

The launch of these records represents the latest development in our project to fully name index our birth, marriage and death records. We launched the birth records in July 2010 and the death records will follow in early 2011.

Search our marriage records now to find your ancestors’ marriages.

As you’re probably aware, one of the larger projects the findmypast.co.uk team has been working on this year is a complete revamp of our General Register Office (GRO) birth, marriage and death (BMD) indexes.

We’ve created a completely new, clearer set of images of the original records and we’ve also been working to transcribe each and every one of them for the very first time. This allows you to search directly for your ancestors, rather than having to browse several pages to find the person you are looking for.

Of course, some England & Wales BMD records are available elsewhere online, and some of them are even fully-indexed like our new ones, but to date, nobody else has provided a complete set of fully-indexed BMD records - another first for findmypast.co.uk, and a project which should be complete in early 2011 when we launch the death records. As always, our aim is to make your family history easier and this project is no different…

So, having launched the new birth records a few months ago, recently we’ve turned out attention to marriages.

Marriage search challenges

One of the main difficulties with searching marriages is the need to search for both spouses separately, and then compare the registration district, volume and page numbers to see if the two match up. Even worse, because more than one marriage is recorded on a single page of the GRO indexes, even if you manage to match up two potential partners, it is always possible that they actually married someone else on the same page of the index that you haven’t tracked down.

Another major challenge is finding wives when you do not know their maiden name. Often you will come across a new branch of your family in a census and identify a new husband and wife, listed under their married surname. Finding the husband in marriage records is generally possible, but without knowing the wife’s maiden name, tracking down the marriage can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Introducing MarriageMatch^TM

To help overcome these inherent difficulties, we’ve been developing a new search technology we call MarriageMatch^TM, which should make searching for marriages much easier, and should even help you unravel some mysteries in your tree.

MarriageMatch^TM does something very clever - rather than searching for one spouse in a marriage, it searches for both at the same time, and does the matching up for you. If you give the surnames of both spouses and they married after 1912, it will generally produce a list of exact matches - people with the surnames you are looking for who definitely got married to each other.

If they married before 1912, or if you only know the first name of one of the spouses, it will also show you all the potential matches on the GRO index page: in most cases you only have to choose between two (or occasionally four) people that your ancestor might have married. In any case, because it shows everybody on the same results page, you can be confident that one of the people on your results screen is the right one, and you don’t need to dig further.

Ian Tester, findmypast.co.uk's product manager

Where it really comes into its own is when you know the surname of the husband and just the first name of the wife - again, MarriageMatch^TM will find you all the records where, for example, a Thomas Smith married a Catherine. You can even use a variants search on either or both of the names if you are not 100% sure of the first name the wife may have been recorded under.

We have been testing it thoroughly at findmypast towers, and it has been incredibly valuable for us - it seems to have an uncanny ability to identify the marriage you are looking for from the millions of marriage records you might have been browsing for years, hoping to get lucky. I managed to crack five long-standing brick walls in my tree (husbands with common surnames marrying wives with common first names) in 20 minutes flat and we’re hoping you’ll find it just as useful.

We’re just doing some final tweaks to it now and will make it available on site in early December.

I’d really recommend that if you have any marriages that have left you baffled, you start digging them out now so you’re ready to see if MarriageMatch^TM really can solve some of those marriage mysteries…

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.

In last month’s newsletter we asked you to send us your experiences of researching your family tree. Thanks to all of you who wrote in - we really enjoyed reading your stories. Read on for how Liz is getting on with the search for her ancestors:

Liz Riley’s story:

‘I’ve had a lot of trouble locating people on one branch of my tree because they have changed their first names. The first one to come to mind was my husband’s great great grandmother who was christened Ellen Fawcett in 1809 and was named that at her marriage in 1832. Then on all the censuses she was Ellen Riley (her married name) and Ellen Fawcett on the birth certificates of her children. This was consistent until her death in 1874 which I could not find for many years.

I knew she died between 1871 and 1881, as I couldn’t find her on the 1881 census and couldn’t find a second marriage for her. I bought one certificate which looked close enough in DOB (1911) but it was the wrong Ellen Riley. So I gave up looking until recently I noticed a number of Eleanors among her grandchildren and great grandchildren and decided to risk the expense of buying the certificate - this was after checking the 1871 census for Eleanor Riley born about 1809 to ensure there wasn’t another person who this could be. It paid off and I now have the correct death cert for Ellen - I still can’t figure out why she suddenly changed her name though! I’ve noticed several others who had different names on official documents from the ones on censuses, but for Ellen this was a one-off.

This led to my reviewing a number of Ellen’s children and grandchildren who had seemingly disappeared without trace. Her daughter, always Ann on earlier censuses, turned out to be Susannah, her grandson Riley turned out to be Samuel (Riley was his middle name) and his brother Herbert was later known as John (his middle name) when he migrated to the US. Another brother, Henry, was known as Harry, so I was able to find some of his missing records when told this by a living descendant. I should have guessed these name changes earlier as my father-in-law was Lewis John, but was always known as John or Jack, and his sister Beatrice Maud (still living at 106) is mostly known as Maud, but was Betty to her husband. Also my husband’s grandmother was known as Annie, whereas her name was Ruth Hannah.

So my advice to others is to keep trying different variations of first names and second names, as they may have gone by different names at different times of their lives. You may also find clues in younger generations’ names (I now understand why my father-in-law almost insisted that we add John and Ruth as middle names to our first born son and daughter). It’s also important to get the certificates to ensure you have the correct person, but before purchasing them, check censuses if available to help rule out the wrong ones or you can spend a fortune on the wrong certificates. This is why it is important to have a subscription as it gives you the freedom to check all the resources available without worrying about how many credits you’re using up.’

We’ve just added over 59,000 new parish records for the period 1633 to 1930, which include baptisms, marriages, and burials.

The new additions are:

• Montgomeryshire baptisms, marriages, and burials (various parishes)
• Dorset burials (various parishes)
• Brayton, St Wilfred burials
• Wrightington baptisms, marriages, and burials
• Wrightington confirmations and Wrightington first communicants (found under FFHS other records)

With over 23.4 million baptisms, marriages and burials dating from 1538, our Parish Records Collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive online repositories of parish records.

Search for your ancestors in our Parish Records Collection now