Family records

From Jerripedia
Jump to: navigation, search


The family records section of Jersey Archive

One of the main objectives of Jerripedia is to provide an on-line resource for those researching their ancestry in Jersey. Crucial to this research are the church records of baptisms, marriages and burials. Records up to 1940 (depending on parish and type of record) are free to view in Jerripedia.

This section of the site contains a comprehensive index to the records for all 12 parishes, plus seven other Church of England churches. We have translated all records from the original French and present them in full A-Z indexes of individual records listed by parish and in date order. However, due to the problems associated with updating over 5,000 Jerripedia pages every time there has been a major review of our database of records, we have decided to cease mainting these indexes.

The Jerripedia team's priority since September 2018 has been to correct errors in the database and identify any missing records, and add them, together with supplementary information such as names of godparents, when available. That progress will continue indefinitely as we discover errors or they are pointed out to us by users.

However, we will no longer update the indexes to match and, instead, we encourage all researchers to use our dababase , which provides a faster and more effective way of searching the most up-to-date records. The database is very easy to use, but if you want some help, have a look at our Guide to using the Family Search facility

For those who prefer searching our indexed records, we are retaining a set for each parish, added to the site in 2017 and accessible from the links on this page, but WITH A STRONG WARNING that they are not up-to-date and may contain inaccuracies, and some records may be missing.

We previously included a link from each parish page to a further set of indexed records - the originals added to the site in 2013 - but all of these are now being removed. We apologise to anyone who may have old bookmarks or come across old links which took them direct to these pages, but allowing such links to continue carries a strong risk of researchers accessing out-of-date indexes without realising that there are better ways of looking for information about their ancestors.

We cannot stress too strongly that the best, FREE, way of searching church records is to use OUR DATABASE which is directly accessible from family pages and family trees throughout the site.




Donations

Jerripedia is an entirely voluntary undertaking with no income from advertising, registration fees or from 2021,

any form of sponsorship. Web-hosting costs in the region of

£2,500 a year

have to be met from user contributions. If you have found the site helpful in your research, please help take

us forward by making a donation, however small. To support us, please click on the button in the left column




Church registers and Registrar records

Jerripedia had the first online index to Jersey parish church baptism, marriage and burial records and it remains, not only the most comprehensive, but the only index which can be accessed free of charge. We continually update our database of over 500,000 records correcting errors and adding missing records.

Until August 2020 the database only contained records for Anglican churches, but now we are adding records from Roman Catholic, Methodist and other non-conformist churches. This process will continue as more records become available.


Church Records Search


To access our collection of church records it was previously necessary to use the A-Z indexes in the parish pages shown below. Those indexes have become progressively more and more out-of-date and some records are either missing or contain errors. The indexes are no longer being updated and have been superseded by a single A-Z search facility covering records in all parishes, and now in the non-Anglican churches, too. Select the first letter of the family name you are searching for from the A-Z list below and a page will open in a new tab showing a list of names included in our baptism records. You can select a name to search for or change to marriage or burial records first.

Once the list of records is displayed you can narrow the search using the accompanying form by choosing a given name, parish or start and end dates. If you don't find the ancestor(s) you are looking for you can search for a variant of the family name, or just search for part of a name

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

The parish pages are being retained to include other record sets but indexes to records which will be found using this search facility are progressively being removed.



Registrar records of births, marriages and deaths, and how to apply for certificates


Dates: Until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the New Year started on March 26 each year, so all dates in January and February, and up to 25 March, had the same year number as the previous year. In the transcriptions of church registers, dates during this period are shown in the style '1645/6', but to conform with the style adopted throughout Jerripedia all dates in our indexes are shown as if the New Year started on 1 January

Main index pages

CB2.jpg


Martin.png St Martin


Mary.png St Mary


Ouen.png St Ouen


Pierre.png St Peter


Saviour.png St Saviour


Trinity.png Trinity

Other churches

MethodistLogo.png - Methodist Church

RCIcon.png - Roman Catholic Church

OtherIcon.jpg - Other churches

From August 2020 we have begun adding records for non-Anglican churches to our comprehensive database. They will automatically appear in any search using the A-Z selector above. We will not be adding separate listings of these records, because using our search facility will always locate the most up-to-date selection. This is particularly important with these new records, because we cannot add all of them until they have been digitised and indexed by Jersey Archive, which holds the original registers.

Work on processing these records has been slow. Of some 150 record sets held by the Archive, only about a quarter have been digitised so far. These represent some 15,000 Methodist Church records, 1,500 Roman Catholic, and 1,200 for other non-conformist churches. We do not know the total number of Baptism, Marriage and Burial records which will ultimately become available, but the 1,500 Roman Catholic records are obviously a small fraction of the total, and the number has grown very slowly since work began on processing those records over five years ago.

We are currently working to add further records to our database, and as more become available, they will be added in due course. Each record contains a link to the Archive website, so that subscribers to that site will be able to easily locate and view the original register entries.

The new records will appear in any search from this page, and from individual family pages, mixed in with Anglican church records in date order. It will be easy to narrow that search to include just the records for an individual group of churches, or for a single church - Anglican or non-Anglican.



Free look-up service

The release of baptism registers for Jersey's Church of England churches by Jersey Heritage to Ancestry in 2016 meant that vital historical documents which were previously locked away from public view in the vaults of Jersey Archive were in the public domain. Regrettably these registers, containing records of the most important events in the lives of our ancestors, are still inaccessible to those without an Ancestry subscription.

W17StHelierBaptismRegister.jpg

To coincide with the addition of the new records to Jerripedia's already extensive online collection, we started a free service to look up register entries on behalf of our users. This has been used extensively and very successfully since it was introduced.



The service is limited to one request per email address at a time and covers two types of search

  • An attempt to find an elusive record which researchers believe should be in our index, but is not there, possibly because it was incorrectly transcribed
  • A search for extra information which may be contained in the original register entry but has not been copied to our index

We have encouraged a two-way exchange of information, to help us improve on the accuracy of our index, so, as our article explaining this service in detail indicates, priority is given to requests accompanied by information drawing attention to errors located in other records, or providing extra details.




Personal tools
other Channel Islands
contact and contributions
Donate

Please support Jerripedia with a donation to our hosting costs