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Before parish registers were introduced, births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials were not officially recorded, though some notes may have been kept by the parish priest. However, many other records which contain genealogical information start well before 1538, and continue long after.
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Parish registers were formally introduced in England and Wales on 5 September 1538 shortly after the formal split with Rome in 1534, when Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, acting as his Vicar General, issued an injunction requiring that each parish of the Church of England kept registers of all baptisms, marriages, and burials. Surviving Roman Catholic communities became discouraged from keeping similar records, as they needed their names to remain hidden in a country now hostile to the Church of Rome.
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A parish register, alternatively known as a parochial register, is a handwritten volume, normally kept in the parish church of an ecclesiastical parish, in which details of baptisms (together with the dates and often names of the parents), marriages (with the names of both partners), and burials (within the parish) are recorded.
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From 1597 a copy of the records had to be made and sent to the Bishop. Referrred to as the Bishops' Transcript, they sometimes contained more information than the original.
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Originally the parish registers were written on paper but, in 1598, parchment registers were introduced. Unfortunately, during the English Civil War (1643-1647) and in the following periods of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, records were poorly kept and many went missing, became damaged by beetles or rats or rendered illegible by damp.
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Civil registration, the government recording of births, marriages, and deaths, was instituted on 1 July 1837 in England and Wales. The act required for births to be reported within 42 days of the event and deaths within 5 days. Marriages had to be recorded in a civil register immediately after the ceremony. Originally, only the fathers' names of the bride and groom were included on marriage certificates, but from 4 May 2001, with the introduction a new digital system to modernise, simplify and speed up the process by which marriages are registered, the mothers' names are recorded as well.
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