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PARISH registers were introduced into England and Wales in 1538 when Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, ordered every parish to keep records of baptisms, marriages and burials. Until 1597 these were simply entered onto loose sheets, with the unfortunate result that huge numbers were lost forever. If you can find a church with registers surviving from 1538 you are lucky indeed. One such is the parish church of HALIFAX, St. John the Baptist. In 1597 it was ordered that registers should be bound into volumes and also that copies should be sent to the Bishop's office, these becoming known as the BISHOP'S TRANSCRIPTS. Sometimes you will find when researching that the original registers have disappeared but the BTs exist, so it is well worth tracking these down. They are now held almost entirely in record offices. The BTs also quite often fill in gaps in the original registers - moreover, the details given in the BTs sometimes vary from the registers, so, again, watch out! If you spend a lot of time on the Mormon FamilySearch website and follow the link from the search results pages by clicking on "Source Call" you will note that many of the records have been filmed from the BTs, rather than the registers. This may have been because when the controlled extraction program was first launched many parish registers were still in the hands of the incumbents, who would not give permission for them to be filmed, so the LDS went instead to the County Record Offices and filmed the BTs. Parishes varied enormously in size, especially in Yorkshire. Halifax parish, for instance, was once the largest in England, extending from the outskirts of Bradford to the Lancashire border at Todmorden and containing over 20 townships. Many parishes had smaller divisions within them, known as chapelries with their own church. Sometimes in rural areas parishes did not have a large enough congregation to justify a permanent cleric, so one incumbent would cover more than one place. A phrase you will come across is "cum" which simply means "with". A great many parish registers have been published in book form, usually by a county parish register society (as in the case of the Yorkshire Parish Register Society which has published a large number) or local FHS. Copies of these can be found in genealogical and local libraries, record offices, Mormon Family History Centres, etc. The Society of Genealogists library in London has probably the largest collection of printed Yorkshire parish registers outside Yorkshire. As always, it is always best to try and check the primary source - i.e. the original handwritten registers - but it is often difficult to see them these days, since many record offices now have a policy of not producing them for fear of deterioration. Normally, you have to make do with the film, but if you find a page you cannot read and throw yourself on the archivist's mercy they will sometimes let you see the original! I think this varies from office to office, so don't count on it. Many early registers are in Latin, so you may need to learn a little expertise in translating them. You may find names like "Edwardus" for Edward and "Guillelme" for William etc. "Baptizatus erat," "nupti erat" and "sepultus erat" mean baptised, married and buried. Moreover, like all of us, clerics were sometimes forgetful, lazy or incompetent and either got entries wrong or forget to enter events altogether! The detail given in register entries varies considerably also from parish to parish, depending on how conscientious or otherwise the incumbent was. Mostly, it is fairly sparse, giving only the date and nature of the event. In many baptismal entries only the father's name is given and not the mother's. The form of entries in parish registers changed little between 1597 and 1754, when Hardwicke's Marriage Act came into effect. This imposed a standard form of entry for marriage in an attempt to prevent clandestine marriages, of which there were many. It was possible to be married without the calling of banns or the obtaining of a licence, and there were certain clergymen willing to perform illicit marriages. The most notorious of these was in London's Fleet Prison, where there were 217 marriages performed on the day before Hardwicke's Marriage Act came into effect. After this date the record of marriage had to be signed by both parties and witnesses in a bound volume of printed forms. During the Commonwealth period (after the Civil War and until the Restoration of Charles II) marriages were often conducted in places other than churches and the banns were often called in the nearest market place. * Do be extremely CAREFUL when recording in your family records any events from parish registers before 1752. Until that year, the New Year began not on January 1st but on Lady Day, March 25th. Therefore, the entries continue beyond December 31 into the next year (in modern terms) as being the same year. The best way to write any date before 1752 between January 1 and March 25 is to follow this example: - February 17th 1677/8. However, if you are working from a printed register or transcription, do check that the date has not already been modernised. It should say so clearly somewhere at the front of the volume. * REMEMBER that baptisms did not always take place immediately after birth. Sometimes the two events could be several years apart. You often come across cases of parents having several children baptised together, so a christening date is not necessarily a reliable guide to age. In Yorkshire some parishes were extremely lucky in having what were called DADE REGISTERS, named after the Rev William Dade, vicar of several Yorkshire parishes, who instituted a system of giving substantially more information than normal. If you come across these they are a gold mine, since they usually give in a baptismal entry not only the name of the father but the mother's name, father's occupation, and the names of both grandfathers and parishes of residence, thus taking you back another generation and to other places. In 1812 a further new system was introduced extending the amount of information given but, ironically, giving less information than had previously occurred under Dade Registers. There is no overall guide to which parishes had Dade Registers but you will certainly know them when you see them. Finally, if you want to know what parish had what registers you really should obtain one of two books - Yorkshire Parish Registers by Colin Blanshard Withers, which covers all Anglican parishes in Yorkshire with full details of when the registers begin, where the originals are held and what copies exist; or the National Index of Parish Registers, Volume 11 Parts 2 and 3,
published by the Society of Genealogists (in two volumes, one covering the North and East Ridings and the other, Part 3, the West Riding). The NIPR gives details of not only Anglican churches but Catholic and Nonconformist as well. These books also list Yorkshire Record Offices (of which there are many).
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