Parish Registers
Church (or parish) registers were introduced in 1538 and contain records of baptisms and burials (as distinct from births and deaths) and, of course, marriages. Although many early registers have been lost over the years, a surprising number still exist. Today, very few registers, other than those which are still in use, are held at churches.
In addition to the registers, from 1598 parish priests had to send to their bishop an 'annual return', a copy of the register, known as a Bishops' Transcript. Those that still exist can be very useful in supplying entries omitted from the register or replacing a missing register.
For many years now the Dorset History Centre has kindly allowed our members to copy full details of the entries in the original registers. As a result, the Society now holds a very large collection of Parish Register Transcriptions for Dorset. We have concentrated on transcribing records before 1838, as later records are more easily available in the form of Birth, Marriage and Death certificates issued following the introduction of civil registration in 1837. Members are continuing to transcribe the registers. We are grateful that some transcriptions of later years have been donated to the Society.
Details of the Parishes which have been transcribed can be found by clicking on one of the links in the side bar. These pages show the up to date list of transcriptions which are held at our Treetops Research Centre.
At some point the paper copies of the latest updates (shown in bold italics on this site) need to be taken for fiching and will then be unavailable for about a week. If booking a visit to Treetops specifically to search these latest transcriptions, please check that they will be available when you visit.
Details of how to obtain transcriptions from these records are set out on our Search Services page.
Many of our transcriptions can also be searched online at Find My Past for a very modest price (only pence). The online records were updated in October 2009.
There is an ongoing project to identify those Parishes which, although transcribed and held on fiche at Treetops, do not appear online. This involves copy typing the paper records into Excel, so can be time consuming.