Spitalfields Registers

[DocDAve]

I believe the protestant church was built by 1729 - ChristChurch

Where can I find the registers - online, on CD, as download please?

I need to have the most complete collection available, preferably with images

My research is pointing towards Sears as Londoners but can't rule out Huguenot

[Pam Downes]

Parish registers are available on Ancestry.
Dataset- London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812

Although you can use them, if you want to go through the actual pages of the registers, ignore the name boxes.
On the right-hand side of the page you'll see 'browse this collection'.
Borough is Tower Hamlets, and Christ Church Spitalfields should be the second option in the 'parish' section.

Then you get a choice of years.
I'm guessing that one set of registers are the parish registers and the other are the Bishops Transcripts. The two should be identical, but very often aren't, so do go through both sets.

Remember back in those early days that baptisms, marriages, and burials were in just one register, although after 1754 marriages should have been in a separate register.
Also not all events were listed in one year. Often baptisms are listed on the left-hand page, burials on the right-hand one, and marriages began halfway through the register!

Enjoy!

[DocDAve]

In your experience do Ancestry do a good job at transcribing and listing these records?

[Pam Downes]

If by 'these records' you mean the parish registers for Christ Church, I can't say as I've never used them.

If you mean parish registers in general on Ancestry, I would say that I've found most of the entries I was searching for when using a name. However, was I unable to find other entries because they just weren't in a dataset (e.g. baby never baptised), or because of inaccurate transcribing, or bad handwriting in the register?
That's why being able to 'browse' a PR by going through every page is such a bonus. You can see that the Louth in the index is supposed to be South. (At one stage a capital S looked very like a capital L.)

No human transcriber is 100% accurate. I can show you an entry in a PR and I will defy anyone to say whether the name is Thorpe (as transcribed) or Sharpe (as my research thinks it is) such is the 'quality' of the vicar's handwriting.
If a transcriber lives away from the town/district/country then the accuracy level can easily drop because they're not familiar with local names, pronunciation, etc. Indexes produced by local FHS are usually far more accurate than those produced by other groups simply because of familiarity with the area. However, as previously noted, transcription accuracy also depends very much on the legibility of the handwriting.
Sometimes errors creep in at a 'higher' level of indexing/transcribing, e.g. the famous example of Ancestry in one census listing people born/living in Somerset (SOM in the Chapman Code for counties) as being born/living in Somalia (SOM being the world country code).
OCR 'transcribers' are more prone to errors simply because it's not so easy to see little quirks in handwriting.

Then you have the problem of words being spelt 'as heard'. The surname Eighteen for example, is highly likely to have been Eaton. Plus vicars, etc, spelt words as they thought they should have been spelt, and because the majority of the ordinary people couldn't read or write themselves there was no-one to correct Maryet to Marriott.

By all means, use a name search, but if I have the PR to look at, I would always go through every page in a circumstance like yours. Yes, it's boring, painful, time-consuming and your eyes end up going but you at least know that you've done everything possible to find your ancestors.
Just make sure that, as far as possible, you check that every page has been included. e.g. the years are consecutive.

[DocDAve]

Many thanks