Wherever you are in the old county of Warwickshire, you’re surrounded by history – from the Cathedral in Coventry, to Rugby School, to Warwick’s Tudor houses. The region has played host to some of our most important figures – William Shakespeare was born in Stratford, while it’s said that the Gunpowder Plot was hatched in Warwick. Now you can discover your family’s part in this fascinating tale, with our NEW Warwickshire parish records, 1502-1984.
These comprehensive lists of baptisms, marriages and burials, created in parish churches, take you right back to the time when Catholicism was the established religion, before Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of monasteries such as Nuneaton Priory and Coombe Abbey near Coventry. For the next 300 years the Church was the centre of the local community – so its registers reflect the ups and downs of parish life.
Because these new records overlap with our civil birth, marriage and death indexes, they let you pick up your family’s story where those more recent records leave off in 1837. You could start by searching for a relative that you’ve already found in the civil indexes, to pinpoint the church where they were baptised or buried.
Often, families stayed in the same parishes for generations. So, once you’ve located that first ancestor, you can move back through the centuries, following the twists and turns in your family’s story.
Of course, this is just the latest in our series of parish releases. In the past few months, we’ve also released local collections from West Yorkshire, London, Dorset, Liverpool and Ireland. These add to millions of parish records already at our site.
See all our parish collections.