Help with finding Parish Registers online please

[twinespinner]

Does anyone have any advice about what to enter in the search box when attempting to find parish register transcriptions online? I have tried googling all sorts of combinations of words and I get loads of 'hits', but rarely do I find that any of those hits direct me to sites that contain any searchable data.

What would be a good template search string to find searchable baptism registers for a particular parish online, for instance, that will result in useful hits. I usually give it up as a bad job by the second or third page of the google search results.

[Geoffers]

What is available depends very much on the area. You might try 'freereg' and see if anything is there.

Which county?

Which parish?

[twinespinner]

Hi Geoffers, thanks for replying. I know about freereg and the online parish clerks projects, but I have sometimes stumbled across small sites created by someone who has transcribed their local registers and put them online. I was wondering if there was a way to find these obscure sites which might otherwise be buried on the umpteenth page of the google search results.

It may be that I have been going about things all wrong, because surely there must be a better way to get more useful hits. I waste so much time clicking on sites that turn out not to have any actual data and get sidetracked into reading general information about the parish. I am hoping for general advice about what would be a good search string to use that would bring up searchable databases for whichever particular parish was needed at the time.

[Titanicfan]

Hi Twinespinner

Have you tried typing in the search phrase like this?

"parish register transcriptions"

sometimes you get more specific search results.

Also, have you tried searching for parish register transcriptions on Google Books and on Open Library? (www.openlibrary.org) I've found quite a few different printed transcriptions this way.

Hope this helps.

p.s. out of curiousity do you have Twinespinners in your ancestry in Dorset as I have found that one of my ancestors from Dorset is a Twinespinner?

[Mutley]

I don't think it can be as exact as definite phrase. It will depend on what google picks up from the particular site.

You could try putting in the county and BMD and try putting it in quotes.
e.g.
"Cheshire BMD"
"Bath BMD"

But maybe it is only because I know those two work.

[Carmy]

I found a couple of useful places this morning just by googling the town's or the Parish Church's name. I guess that only works if your ancestors came from a small place.

Good luck.

[Hugh Thompson]

Hi Twinespinner, there are quite a few PR's for Cornwall , Derbyshire and a few others at a free site called UK Genealogy Archives,

http://www.ukgenealogyarchives.org.uk/index.html

Also as Finbar has said I also use the internet archives a lot and have found lots of PR's using search terms such as, Record Society, Parish Register Society, Marriage allegations, Marriage Licences, and terms like that.
Hugh.

[michaelpipe]

Sometimes this works well. Forget the phrases, just enter the name of the parish in the search box. Then after the page has loaded, find the "search within results" box and enter "register". Chances are that if something is there it will find it. Alternatively if "register" doesn't work, try "births", or "baptisms" etc.

[Wirral]

I find the easiest way to find parish register transcriptions is to go to GENUKI www.genuki.org.uk Choose the country, then the county, then "Towns & parishes" at the top of the page, then choose the individual town or village. You never know what you will find - sometimes church registers, but also poll books, name studies, maps, etc, all about that particular place. An invaluable resource!