“What’s in a name?” How to trace your Tudor family history (part 2)

A Tudor parish chest from Kempley in Gloucestershire.

In part 1 of this series we looked at how to begin your family history research and the records you can use to trace your ancestors back to the early nineteenth century. These included the indexes to births, marriages and deaths created by the General Register Office and the census. In this second part you will learn how to trace them back all the way to the 1500s using parish registers, the key resource for Tudor family history.

 Parish registers

The term ‘parish registers’ refers to the records of baptisms, marriages and burials which are kept by local Anglican churches. Like birth, marriage and death certificates, they provide a record of key events in our ancestors’ lives, but are usually less detailed. These registers were introduced in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s right-hand man (whom, naturally, he later executed), so are an ideal starting point for tracing your Tudor family. They were part of the same wave of church reforms which included the dissolution of the monasteries, and were conceived as a way of proving family relationships and settling inheritance disputes.

Sir Thomas Cromwell.

 Cromwell’s Act decreed that each church had to record every baptism, marriage and burial which took place in their parish, but in the beginning they only had to include the date and the names of those being registered. Over time though, many diligent clergymen added more details which are of interest to family historians, such as addresses, occupations and names of other family members (perhaps as a way of differentiating people with similar names).

 As a result, while more recent registers are often quite detailed, the information contained in early Tudor ones can be very sparse, and you will likely find tracing your ancestors more difficult the further back in time you go. To make matters worse, many Tudor registers have not survived, and those that have may be illegible due to centuries of wear and tear, unfamiliar handwriting styles, and that fact that they were usually written in Latin. 

 The two examples below illustrate just how different these earlier registers are to later ones:

Extract from the burial registers for St Nicholas, Deptford, for the year 1593 (image from Ancestry

Extract from the burial registers for St Paul, Deptford, for the year 1850 (image from Ancestry <

Parish registers on the web

 Fortunately many parish registers have now been indexed and made available to search online. Free transcriptions of a large number of UK registers can be accessed via FamilySearch and FreeReg, while high quality digital scans can be viewed on sites like Ancestry, including most surviving London registers.

 To search these, log in to any public PC at Deptford Lounge, Downham, or Lewisham Library and double-click the Ancestry icon on the Desktop. Once you arrive at the site, simply follow these five steps:

1. Click on Search, which you can find at the top of the page
2. Select Birth, Marriage & Death, including Parish from the drop-down menu, which will take you to the Search page
3. Enter whatever details you already know about your ancestor into the search boxes provided (e.g. their name, approximate dates and places of birth, marriage or death) and hit Search to view the Results page
4. Check the results for possible matches, you may wish to filter your results using the options on the left of the screen (e.g. restricting your results to just the Death, Burial, Cemetery & Obituaries sub-category, and then to the collection London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812).
5. Click on a record to view its summary, then select View to see a digital copy of the original parish registers (this option may not be available in all cases).

 By repeating this method each time you discover a new ancestor it is possible to trace your family tree all the way back to the 1500s, but of course this is rarely so straightforward in practice. In the third and last post in this series we will look at some common problems you may have to deal with when searching for your Tudor ancestors, and some useful resources for taking your research even further.