Parish records for all of Wales launched

TheGenealogist has launched the complete set of all Anglican records for Wales held by the consortium of Welsh archives. This major release contains eight million parish records, listing over 14.5 million individuals, with images of the original registers.

Mark Bayley, Head of Online Content at TheGenealogist said: ‘We are very excited to be releasing parish records for all 13 historic Welsh counties. We’re thankful for the input of Welsh records experts from the archives, to make sure that we have accurate parish and place names. This will make it much easier for researchers to find records that they may have experienced difficulties with trying to find elsewhere.

‘TheGenealogist’s keyword search makes it surprisingly easy to find the record you’re after and SmartSearch allows you to find families in the registers.

‘These records compliment our Nonconformist records for Wales which include Methodists, Quakers and more, giving researchers the ultimate resource for finding their Welsh ancestors’ vital events.’

This release includes all historic Welsh counties: Anglesey, Brecknockshire, Caernarfonshire, Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Glamorgan, Merionethshire, Monmouthshire, Montgomeryshire, Pembrokeshire and Radnorshire.

Kim Collis, West Glamorgan County Archivist, said on behalf of all the Welsh archives contributing their parish records: ‘We are delighted that TheGenealogist is releasing these records to a wider audience. Being able to access them from the comfort of your own home, especially during the current situation, is of great benefit.

‘For this release, we’ve painstakingly gone through the metadata, improving all the place names in this record set, recording chapels of ease, parent parishes of modern parishes, and variant spellings in the English and Welsh languages. This will mean that searches for your ancestor in the parish records, which previously might have turned up no results, will have a much greater chance of finding them for you.

‘If you’ve previously struggled to find your ancestors’ Welsh parish records, I’d really encourage you to search these records.’

To find out more about Welsh Parish Records and this release, visit  here

This release has been made possible by the participation of the following archives: Anglesey Archives, Carmarthenshire Archive Service, Ceredigion Archives, Conwy Archive Services, Denbighshire Archives, Flintshire Record Office, Glamorgan Archives, Gwent Archives, Gwynedd Archives Service, Pembrokeshire Archives and Local Studies, Powys Archives and West Glamorgan Archive Service.

Last month Ruth Jones searched for her Welsh roots in Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC One. TheGenealogist has found her ancestors in this new collection: see  here

1.54m Norfolk records also go online

TheGenealogist has added over 1.54 million individuals to its Norfolk Parish Record Collection. These baptism, marriage and burial records have been released in association with Norfolk Record Office and have the benefit of high quality images to complement the transcripts, making them a valuable resource for those with ancestors from this area.

With records that reach back to the mid 16th century, this release allows family historians to find the names of forebears, their parents’ forenames, the father’s occupation (where noted), and the parish that the event took place in.

This latest addition brings the total number of individuals in the parish records for Norfolk on TheGenealogist to over 11.5 million.