John Wintrip: A History of Parish Registers in England & Wales

Posted on 16th May 2026 by English Ancestors

I first met John Wintrip when I applied to become an Associate of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA). John was at that time Chair of the Board of Assessors. We met again several months later when I progressed to Member. I was struck by his encouraging manner and passion for genealogy, and was delighted when he asked me to review his latest book. In the interests of full disclosure, I received this copy of the book when I agreed to do the review. However, all views expressed below are my own.

The book is very readable. Indeed, the parish registers of England and Wales have been a personal passion for John for some time, being also the topic of original research culminating in his dissertation submitted for Licentiateship of the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, awarded in 2019.

This is not a ‘How To’ manual. Rather it is an overview and account of the history and development of parish registers, the goal being to encourage readers to recognise changes in their format, and to understand what’s behind those changes and the references or symbols we sometimes come across alongside our ancestors’ entries in baptism, marriage and burial registers.

The focus of the book is the period 1660 to 1837. Nevertheless, a short summary chapter of the key issues of the earlier years (1538-1660) is included, as is a summary of the post-1837 era, when civil birth, marriage and death registration came into operation and the secular role of parish registers ended. Having set the direction of the book, the chapters are set out largely with a chronological account of the changes in three main periods: 1660 to 1753; 1754 to 1812; and 1813 to 1837. Each of these periods is recognisable to family historians as commencing with an important change impacting the keeping of parish registers. The Restoration in 1660 overturned the Commonwealth period rules for the maintenance of the registers as a civil matter and restored the diocesan structure of the Church; Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, implemented in 1754, brought in new strict rules for the administration of marriages; and 1813 saw the implementation of George Rose’s Act of 1812, which applied primarily to baptism and burial registers.

Taken as a whole, the period witnessed the transformation of a society ordered by the Church to a more diverse one, where secular and governmental matters gradually took precedence. The rules relating to parish registers were set down in 1604 by canon 70 of the Church of England. Yet parish registers were not simply a record of who had undergone the sacramental rites. Prior to the introduction of civil births, marriages and deaths in 1837, it was the local parish church that kept track of the population. Baptism entries evidenced paternity, while marriage enabled the presumption of paternity; and entries on marriage registers sealed the legal contract that placed the property and inheritance of the bride into the hands of her new husband. However, the decades following 1660 were characterised by a gradual acceptance of the right to religious freedom. This necessitated a recognition that, since it was the Church of England parish registers that evidenced paternity, property and inheritance rights, somehow the Dissenters needed to be accommodated within them.

Within this context, John outlines the gradual development from the early years in which often, baptism entries might simply have included the child’s name, to an understanding that the descent from one generation to the next also needed to be recorded. Although the rules governing the content and layout of parish registers, the writing surface used and even requirements for their safe keeping, were set down by canon 70, gradually accommodations were reached whereby births of the children of Dissenters/ Nonconformists could be included in registers and in burial arrangements.

John outlines the introduction of various requirements over time, such as ‘burial in wool’ and taxes on entries in parish registers – and how these might be identified in the parish registers. They are, of course, governmental intrusions into the parish registers, and further evidence of the secular aspect of the Church’s record-keeping. However, it was not until 1754 that the secular imperatives took precedence. In that year, with the implementation of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, specifically ‘An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages’, marriage became subject to statute law. Although the circumstances in which marriages could take place had been set down by the Church in 1604, over time they had often been ignored, sometimes with serious consquences for respectable yet unwitting bigamous wives and their children, as well as ruined heiresses. Hardwicke’s Act set down new strict requirements for the administration and recording of marriages, alongside significant penalties for clergy who failed to comply. In a chapter entirely devoted to the paperwork created by this Act, John explains the administrative changes, the statutory requirements, the role of private printing companies in their interpretation and practice and many other aspects. This was also the first time the subjects of an entry in a parish register were required to sign. John covers reasons why the absence of a signature might be a choice, rather than evidence of our ancestor’s illiteracy or limited literacy skills. (It clarified an anomaly relating to one of my own 3x great grandfathers.)

Something all family historians come to realise is that the records we use for our research were never intended to be for our benefit; rather we are accidental beneficiaries. I was surprised, then, to learn that our pains were shared by antiquarians as long ago as the late seventeenth century. Prominent Leeds historian Ralph Thoresby (1658–1725) seems to have been the originator of the first published proposals for more detailed baptism and burial entries in 1715, but he was influenced in this by the fabulous register entries devised by Thomas Kirke in the nearby parish of Adel. (If you have access to Ancestry, they start here, in 1685, on page 2) Thoresby’s needs when searching the registers in the course of constructing pedigrees of prominent local families and for local history research led him, like us, to desire more information about the parentage or other family connections of the individuals recorded.

Over the course of the following decades, the developments we see when consulting parish registers, came about as a result of many men of the cloth improving the arrangement of their entries in the registers of their own parishes and sharing their ideas with fellow ministers; others publishing pamphlets with their ideas for improving the system; and in several dioceses after around 1770, the issuing of directives by bishops or archdeacons for the adoption of fuller register entries. There are chapters in the book devoted to initiatives in the dioceses of Carlisle, St Asaph and Norwich, the wonderful William Dade system recommended in the dioceses of York and Chester, and in Salisbury and Durham, where Shute Barrington’s recommendations were widely followed. (I previously wrote about the Dade Registers here.)

To reiterate my previous point, it is fortunate for us as genealogists that our passion for ancestor-hunting correlates so closely to more practical matters of wealth and inheritance. As Shute Barrington wrote in 1789:

“Real and extensive benefits would […] result from the introduction of a better form of register than that at present in common use. Ascertaining claims of property, especially maternal property, and the investigation of lineal and collateral descents, would be among those benefits.”

[Shute, Lord Bishop of Sarum, extract from A Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Sarum (Salisbury: Printed by B.C.Collins, 1789) In: John Wintrip: A History of Parish Registers in England and Wales from the Restoration to Civil Registration. Appendix 10]

Indeed, so good were the entries in some parts of the country that when, following the Rose Act of the previous year, standard printed papers for baptisms and burials were introduced in 1813, the absence of dedicated spaces for the actual date of birth and for the mother’s maiden name was viewed by some as an extremely retrograde step. Some ministers continued to include the same information as they had done previously, fitting the extra notes into the tabulated forms now required.

Who will benefit from this book?
It will be useful for anyone starting to work with earlier parish registers. The combination of the chronological layout, broken into identifiable topics via chapter headings and more focused searching in the index when you come across some inexplicable symbol or abbreviation in a parish register, should cover all bases. (I will certainly be doing this from time to time!) All of that is reinforced by a useful timeline of major changes and proposals for change at Appendix 1. When we know about diocesan-wide changes in register entries, but our ancestor falls just outside the operative dates, it’s sometimes useful to switch to older or younger siblings to get the extra information from their baptisms.

However, there is likely to be new information even for more advanced genealogists. Amongst the new finds for me was that, although the terms ‘baptism’ and ‘christening’ are largely interchangeable in the Church of England, a practical distinction has sometimes been made between them in connection with arrangements for private baptisms.

Discussion of ‘Day Books’ also provided food for thought. Although the rules set down in 1604 required that the registers be completed on a weekly basis by the vicar in the presence of at least one of his churchwardens, in practice many kept a Day Book to record baptisms and burials as they happened, writing the notes into the parchment registers at a later date – often much later. The whole issue of ‘originals’ and ‘transcriptions’ is of much importance to genealogists: the original or a digital image of it is always to be preferred; and that means the parish register. But what if the parish register is not, in fact, the ‘original’? What if, in copying over information from the Day Book to the official register, mistakes were made, or entries left out, or worse still – if the entire Day Book goes missing before they are copied across?

With an interest in social history, alongside the detailed focus upon parish registers, I found myself thinking of the impact on society, what was happening in the country to bring about these changes when they happened, and how did they affect the ordinary person.

Whilst reading, knowing that some of the information related to parishes with which I’m well acquainted, I found myself going back to my own and other family trees I’ve worked on, to check if the wording on these specific entries complied with the new rules. I confess I hadn’t realised that some of the more modest ‘enhanced’ entries were the result of directions from the bishop; I had assumed them to be personal preferences of the parish incumbent.

In conclusion, I found John’s book to be readable, authoritative and meticulously researched. While his focus here is on the parish registers themselves, when the point under discussion encompasses a broader question, footnotes point to other texts where that issue is more fully discussed. Other key texts are reprinted in the appendices, and the various changes in registers are illustrated throughout.

John Wintrip: A History of Parish Registers in England and Wales from the Restoration to Civil Registration is published by The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 2026.
ISBN 978 0 718 89848 9

‘A Crysome child’

Posted on 1st Apr 2022 by English Ancestors

On 22nd August 1702 the child of one of my kinsmen was buried. The entry in the parish register reads ‘A Crysome child of George Lucas of Woodhouse Carr’. I imagined George going to the church and speaking to the vicar: ‘What is the child’s name, Mr Lucas?’ With a long sigh and a weary shake of the head, I could hear George replying: ‘Ayyy… it were a crysome child, ‘ardly drew breath before it were tekken…’ I took the entry on the register to mean that the baby had died even before George and his wife, Ann, had named him or her, and thought it a rather quirky find, that the vicar had recorded those words: a crysome child. I added the baby to my tree with the name A Crysome Child Lucas.

Well, I was partly right. And mostly wrong. It didn’t help that the entry was spelled ‘crysome’, which – look it up in any dictionary – means ‘characterised by crying or weeping; tearful; lamentful’. This was surely a frail, weak baby who was clearly in discomfort.

But it turns out that what the vicar should have written was ‘chrysom’ or maybe ‘chrisome’. The precise spelling varies, but the ‘h’ was important.

A chrysom (or chrisom) cloth was a white cloth or mantle. Symbolising purity, it was thrown over a child during baptism or christening. The cloth was annointed with ‘chrism’ – consecrated oil – and its practical purpose was to protect the oil from being accidentally rubbed off.

Part of a memorial monument showing three chrisom swaddled babies.

The image shows part of a monument to Thomas Selwyn 1546-1613, and his wife Elizabeth (Goring) of Friston Place. The full monument shows the two of them kneeling at a prayer desk, beneath which are three chrisom swaddled babies, all boys. Source: Wikipedia: Chrisom.

The baby’s family retained the chrisom cloth for one month after the baptism. This coincided with the mother’s return to society after giving birth. Today, the ‘churching’ of women is viewed as a thanksgiving and blessing for the delivery of the child and the mother’s survival, but until 1552 there was a purification element to this. Helen Osborne (Our Village Ancestors, p.30) writes that the baptised child would continue to be covered by the cloth until the mother was churched. For any baby dying during this period the chrisome cloth would be used as a shroud, and the baby would be termed ‘a Chrisome child’.

It follows from all of the above that a baptism was not the planned, family event into which it has since developed. Almost certainly, the mother would not have been present, since she would be temporarily away from society. Where the vicar also recorded the birthdate, it is clear that until the eighteenth century, babies were baptised as soon as possible. According to FamilySearch: Birth-Baptism Intervals, studies have shown that in the sixteenth century baptism was normally no more than a week after birth. However, from the mid-seventeenth-century onwards the interval gradually increased, one study for the period 1650-1700 indicating 14 days before 75% of children in the register were baptised. That said, I have several records from my own research clearly showing early 19th century babies being baptised on the day they were born. It was important, since tiny babies often died; and only a baptised child could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

But back to 1702, and to George Lucas and his ‘crysome child’. Whilst preparing this post I googled the term with that exact spelling. One of the items returned was a Thoresby Society transcript of the Leeds Parish Registers, opened at page 180. That’s the parish where George buried his baby. On that page alone five ‘Crysome’ children were buried. Four more on page 179, five on page 178, and so on, all the way back to page 169 where the entry for George and his baby are to be found. That’s a lot of fathers to have the exact same conversation with the vicar about their own recently born, sickly, deceased child…

In fact the term ‘Chrisome’ (various spellings, but remember the ‘h’!) had come to be used for any baby dying before baptism. This puts a different spin on all those entries in the Leeds Parish Register. (None of this is restricted to Leeds, by the way; it’s just that this seems to be the only place where the ‘h’ is omitted in the records, resulting in ‘crysome’.) It made me think about the term ‘Christian name’, which was historically a religious personal name given on the occasion of a Christian baptism. Bearing in mind the church’s dual role in this respect – to baptise the child into the church and also to record the existence of an individual in accordance with the requirements of the state – there is the possibility of a punitive aspect to the recording of a child who has not been baptised, and therefore officially and religiously has no name, as merely ‘a Chrysome child’. We might assume any child so recorded is unbaptised, since a baptised child – even if a Chrysome child in the sense of dying within a month of baptism – would be recorded with his or her own Christian name. It seems comparable to the recording of a child born out of wedlock as ‘baseborn’ (or related terms). How much more difficult for the parents of this period to know that not only would their dead child never be allowed to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but also he or she would forever remain nameless in the eyes of God.

In the midst of all this pondering I watched the Season 11 finale of Call the Midwife, in which it was revealed that even in 1967 it was common for premature babies to be buried with another deceased person, this being the only way to make sure they had a proper Christian burial and resting place. There is no doubt that George’s unbaptised ‘Crysome child’ was buried, but I wonder if, as an extra pain for the parents to bear, it had to be in an unconsecrated part of the burial ground.

By way of conclusion I’d like to make a few points. First, it’s important that we keep an open mind about our interpretation of records. Something new may come along to make us think ‘hold on… I wonder if….’; and if it does we should explore it. Second, we need to learn about the society in which our ancestors lived and worked. The vital importance of the baptism, as revealed above, just doesn’t translate to our own modern society, but in former centuries it was the equivalence of a birth certificate, a proof for inheritance, settlement rights, and the only way to the Kingdom of Heaven. And finally – if we think laterally, we will find information to help us progress our family research in the strangest of sources. Thank you, Call the Midwife! 🙂

*****

I’ll be taking a break for the rest of April. I’ll be back with my next post on 1st May.

Civil BMDs: Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates (Part 1)

Posted on 2nd Jan 2019 by English Ancestors

News broke over Christmas that the cost of civil Birth, Marriage and Death certificates (Civil BMDs) is to increase from £9.25 to £11 (paper copy, postage included) or from £6 to £7 for an emailed pdf. The increases will take effect on 16th February 2019.

If you don’t provide the full index references, there will be an additional charge of £3 – but don’t worry; these are easily found. All the information in the following example, including Volume, Page, etc. was obtained from the searchable index on the General Register Office website.
TALENT, ADA. Mother’s maiden name: WOOD
GRO Reference: 1865, M Quarter, in LEEDS, Volume 09B Page 493

These prices refer to the purchase of certificates from the General Register Office, but local register offices may also provide this service, and for this they set their own charges, usually about £10. Some genealogists prefer to use local offices because this is where the information was originally obtained from the informant. In the days before photocopying, carbon copies, etc, the only way to get that information to the central General Register Office was to copy it out by hand, meaning possibilities of transcript errors, firstly in reading and transcribing the original hand-written record, and later, when that central record was transcribed for the online register. However, not all local offices will send you a facsimile of the original; it may be a typed copy, created upon receipt of your request. It’s for you to decide what you prefer, and to place your orders accordingly.

But do you need a certificate at all?
Now that my research is well progressed, I do buy the odd certificate out of curiosity, but initially my approach was to order only if I believed the certificate would give additional information to help me take my tree further back. To adopt this approach you need to have an idea of what the certificate will include. You also need to know if that same information might be available on another record, accessible without additional charge.

So let’s start by looking at Birth Certificates. Marriage and Death Certificates will follow in my next post. Remember – when we talk about Civil BMDs, we’re referring only to the Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates available since 1837.

Civil Birth Certificates
Information included:
Registration District & Sub District
Register number
When & where born (time may also given – see note below.)
Name
Sex
Name & Surname of Father
Name & Maiden Name and previous married surnames of Mother
Occupation of Father
Description & Residence of informant
Date Registered
Details of name/s entered after Registration

Getting as much information as possible from this record:
Sometimes a time of birth is given. When you see this, it’s normally an indication of twins, triplets, etc. so you should look for more births.

The omission of a father’s name suggests the child is illegitimate. From 1875, in the case of illegitimate births, the father had to be present at the registration to consent to his name being added. The recently deceased father of a legitimate child would still be included.

If the mother has previously been married, the entry will say something like ‘Jane Smith, formerly Jones, previously Brown’. In this example, Smith is her married name, Jones her name by the former marriage, and Brown was her maiden name.

Use the address to cross reference with census returns, directories, etc.

Do you need to purchase this record?
It depends what you want to know. The General Register Office online index provides an overview of this information – just enough to help you decide if this is the right person. Let’s look again at that example given above:
TALENT, ADA. Mother’s maiden name: WOOD
GRO Reference: 1865, M Quarter, in LEEDS, Volume 09B Page 493

Without even purchasing the certificate, we can see the baby’s full name; the mother’s maiden name; the year the birth was registered, and in which quarter (M = March, and refers to Jan-Feb-March); the registration district (Leeds) and where exactly in the GRO’s system this record is to be found.

You don’t see the actual date of birth. Remember that a birth must be registered within 42 days. It’s entirely possible, then, that this child may have been born in December or even November of the previous year. You have to buy the certificate to get the exact date.

Most importantly, the mother’s maiden name is included on the GRO online register. Often, I find this information is all I need to help me progress; I don’t need the actual certificate.

Knowing the Registration District means you can look on the GRO register for more births from the same family. Search using just the surname, mother’s maiden name, registration district, and try every year for a decade or so on either side of your confirmed birth. You will have to do this twice – once for female, once for male registrations.

Other records providing similar information
The 1939 Register includes the actual date of birth of all individuals recorded, but not the place of birth. All censuses from 1851 to 1911 (and before long, 1921) include the year and place of birth but not the actual date of birth. If you’re sure you have the right person this combination may be sufficient for your needs.

The child’s Baptism record may provide you with most of this information. If you’re lucky, you’ll find digital images of the original records online, but this depends on the specific county your ancestor was born in, and whether that county has made digital images of their original records available to Ancestry, FindMyPast, etc.

The introduction of a pre-printed parish baptism record book in 1813 means that by the period we’re discussing (post-1837) entries were standardised, including as a minimum the following information:
Register entry number
Date of Baptism
Child’s name
Parents’ names
Abode (Not usually the actual address)
Quality*, Trade or Profession of father (*e.g. ‘Gentleman’)
By whom the ceremony was performed
(The actual date of birth wasn’t required until around 1860, although some clergymen did include it before then.)

Birth Notices in newspapers will include child’s name, parents’ names, date of birth and possibly their address. Although, infuriatingly, I have at least one ancestor who only went to this trouble for the births of his sons.

You might expect to find the date of birth on military and penal process records. However, historic records tend to record age rather than date of birth of the individual – presumably originally in expectation that many didn’t know their date of birth, or even their age. However, service records may request a person’s age in terms of years and months, and where I’ve been able to check against the actual date of birth, I have found the information given to be accurate.

So what do you think?
Is it worth ordering a few birth certificates now before the price increases, and save yourself a few quid? Of can you find most of the infomation using other sources, and save even more?!