What do parish registers contain

Skip to Main Content. Expand search. Search Search. Sign In Account Management. Information Article Body. Parishes A parish is a local area—usually of similar size to a village or hamlet—centred around a church. Finding the registers When researching vital events from the 16th through early 19th centuries, note that there are no individual certificates; look for entries in the lists of names for each parish.

What parish records contain The types of facts recorded in parish registers varies from parish to parish. Burial entries Burial registers are even more inconsistent than the registers for baptisms and marriages.

Parish Records. URL Name. No rules were issued as to how entries were to be set out in the registers or the amount of detail to be included, so the information tends to be limited.

There may be gaps in the registers, particularly during the Civil War and Commonwealth period, Marriages were entered into pre-printed standard registers. All couples had to marry in an Anglican church for their marriage to be legally valid in this period. The marriages of Nonconformists should therefore be recorded in parish registers during this period. Only Quakers and Jews were exempt from this rule. In addition, all marriages had to be by either banns or by licence to prevent clandestine marriages.

The information recorded includes:. These were also kept from this date; they are normally in the back of the marriage registers up to and then in separate registers. The National Records of Scotland holds the surviving original registers. Registration in the Church of Scotland's registers was costly and unpopular, so many people did not bother to register events at all. Although details of some non-conformists can be found in Established Church registers, many members of other religious denominations chose to have events registered in their own churches.

In addition, rapid urbanisation during the 19th century contributed to the diminishing influence of the Church and a decrease in registration in these areas. Civil registration started in However in a small number of districts the local registrar was not in place at the very beginning and therefore there are a small number of events that are recorded in Old Parish Registers but are not featured in our statutory records.

The records cover all Scottish parishes in existence by — before the introduction of civil registration; the records of Glasgow's Catholic cemetery; and the records of the RC Bishopric of the Forces, which records all sacramental events for British service men and women serving in the armed forces worldwide. Under the provisions of Church Law, all faithful are to have sacramental information recorded in the registers of the parish.

Record format and content varied over time, with the responsibility for the information gathered being placed with the parish priest - since there was no standard format prescribed, record keeping varied enormously from parish to parish and also from year to year.

Approximately registers have survived, the earliest dating from , but most records only begin in the 30 years following the relaxation of legislation against Catholics in the s up to the Roman Catholic Relief Act of when it was permitted to be a member of a Catholic church. Bear in mind that the Church of Scotland parishes did not cover the same areas as Roman Catholic parishes and the parishes of other churches.

For further information about the content of these records see the National Records of Scotland's guide on Catholic parish registers. As well as the Church of Scotland, other Presbyterian churches in Scotland kept registers of baptisms, marriages and burials from onwards.

These other church registers are in the course of being added to the ScotlandsPeople site. The churches concerned were Presbyterian churches that were originally outside the Church of Scotland or left the Church of Scotland but joined or re-joined the Church of Scotland at various points.

These churches were as follows:. Bear in mind that the other churches did not have the same parish structure as the Church of Scotland. The church register search allows you to search for baptisms or births, marriages or banns , burials or deaths and other events like confirmations, sick calls and confessions in the Roman Catholic church.

Choose which of the type of register you are searching from these four, then select a church from Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic Church and other churches. Each church had a different structure of parishes and congregations, so it is not possible to search across all three churches for one parish. Once you have carried out a search for one church, you can select another church in the filter on the results page and repeat the search for that church.

As with other records, you might get the best results by doing a wide search first then narrowing down. So, for example, entering a forename and surname and county but not specifying a parish. Expect inconsistent record keeping, so please make use the search options to vary your search and pick up inconsistent name spelling and cases where the clerk has left a surname or forename blank.

Of all the events recorded in church registers, those of deaths and burials are acknowledged to be the most sparsely kept. Since there was no requirement to record these, a great many parishes simply did not bother and of those that did, many have not survived. Often the only record that a death has taken place will be implied in the payment of a fee to the parish for the hire of the mortcloth or pall which was draped over the coffin or the body itself for the funeral.

Church registers of baptisms may record the date of birth or the date of baptism or both. There is no indication given in the index as to whether the entry is a birth or a baptism, but it is more usual for the index entry to show the baptism date. The amount of information recorded can be variable and most entries contain very little detail. Very occasionally the witnesses' relationships to the child may be recorded. At worst: the mother's name is not recorded at all between certain years or that the entry does not record the sex of the child and the name is ambiguous.

Roman Catholic baptism registers sometimes include the father's occupation and the name of the priest. Registers of Neglected Entries compiled for each parish by the Registrar-General after statutory registration began in , contain a small number of birth entries proved to have occurred between and , but not entered into the parish registers.