Blog

Coming next week – improved parish record search results

We’ve had a range of suggestions from you on how we can improve our parish records search. The feature you asked for most was the ability to make choosing from the results easier by including the parish in search results as well as the county.

Hey presto – from next week (probably Wednesday morning), this feature will be available. Even better, we’ve removed advertising from all search results pages to give us more space to display your results meaning that they will be easier to read and will be able to contain more information. We hope this will make your research that tiny little bit easier!

Keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks for news of a major improvement to the site which we’re working on at the moment. Sorry to be a tease…but the wait will be worth it.

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.

The London Collection launch

Findmypast.co.uk is pleased to offer a collection of records to help people track down their London-based ancestors and unearth the milestone events of famous Londoners from the past. The London Collection includes records of baptisms, marriages and burials which date back to 1538. These include significant dates in the lives of famous Londoners including Charles Dickens’ marriage in Chelsea in 1836, captured in the West Middlesex Marriage Index, and William Blake’s somewhat mysterious burial in 1827 at Bunhill Fields, detailed in the City of London Burial Index.

The collection also includes the records of baptisms in London’s Docklands, some of which provide a fascinating insight into popular baby names of the 1700s, including exotic-sounding names such as ‘Hephzibah’, ‘Delight’ and ‘Philadelphia’.

The findmypast.co.uk ‘London Collection’ includes:

• City of London Burial Index – records from all the churches in the City of London from 1813 to 1890
• West Middlesex Marriage Index – detailing 84,863 marriages in 61 parishes from 1538 to 1837
• London Docklands Baptisms – comprising 407,558 baptisms for London’s docklands areas 1712 to 1933
• London and West Kent Probate Indexes – mainly detailing wills and administrations from 1750 to 1858
• The Matchworkers’ Strike – listing participants of the strike of over 700 men, women and teenage boys and girls working at the Bryant and May factory in East London in 1888, the same year as the Jack the Ripper murders

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.

New Lincolnshire parish records on findmypast.co.uk

We’ve just published around 77,000 new parish records for Lincolnshire from the Lincolnshire Family History Society. There are around 51,000 new marriage index records, 23,000 marriage bond records and 3,000 settlement certificate records. This makes a total of around 220,750 parish records for Lincolnshire. We are expecting more updates from Lincolnshire Family History Society in the future.

See the table below for the amount of Lincolnshire records now on our site:

New parish records added for Lambeth

We’ve added over 31,000 burial records for the parish of St Mary, Lambeth, the former parish church of Lambeth (then in the county of Surrey). These cover the period 1777-1819.