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  • Religious records
    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    Example of marriage records

    Religious records are the various kinds of records which have been produced by organized churches and religious movements throughout the world over approximately the last 5,000 years. The earliest of these are inscriptions which were made on the walls of temples in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Where they made reference to rulers such as the Egyptian pharaohs, they inadvertently provided genealogical information to us thousands of years later. Most religious records that have survived today are from the last thousand years or so and come principally from the Christian tradition. These are enormously valuable for studying family history. For instance, records pertaining to baptisms or christenings, marriages and burials which were kept by churches all around Europe in late medieval and early modern times often allow an individual to trace their ancestors back as far as the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, whereas national censuses and other state-produced demographic records generally only become available from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries onwards.[1]

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    History of Christian religious records

    Parish registers

    Other than burgeoning state or governmental bureaucracies, no group or institution in Europe in medieval and early modern times, i.e. between the fifth and eighteenth centuries, produced as many records as did the various Christian churches. In medieval times the Roman Catholic Church was all-powerful across much of the continent, such that it is referred to as 'Christendom' in the Middle Ages, while even after the schisms produced by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the new churches which emerged simply took over in terms of their record-keeping capacities.

    The reasons for this are not hard to identify. Much like the state itself, the church had enormous influence over society, as both a political entity, as a landholder and as a societal institution. In order to exercise power, records must be kept. As a bureaucratic revolution occurred in countries like England, France, Italy and Germany from the twelfth century onwards the volume of written records that churches were producing on both the local and national level expanded. A considerable proportion of these records have survived down to the present day and are a great resource for studying one’s family history.

    Some of these religious records formed part of parish registers, records kept within parishes to keep track of things like the baptizing, marriage and funerals of individual parishioners. Given that these records are available in some (though not all) parishes in countries like England and France as far back as fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the first national censuses were not carried out in most European countries until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, a person will often be able to trace their ancestors in a given locale back much further using religious records than state-produced demographic records.[2]

    On a broader scale, some religious records are more national and international than local. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church held sway over the religious life of most of Western, Southern, Central and Northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages and continued to do so in many countries like Spain, Italy, France and Austria even after the Protestant Reformation. This resulted in a large volume of documents being sent from archbishops, bishops, priests and the heads of monastic houses to Rome over the centuries. These documents, which can shed light on family history in some instances, are stored today in the Vatican Apostolic Library. The records there can be particularly useful for individuals studying their genealogical background in Italy.[3]

    Types of religious records

    There are a wide range of religious records that have survived down to the present day and which are of great utility for genealogical studies. Some of the main types are as follow:

    • Baptism records - Also referred to as christening records. These will generally give a date and the name of the individual being baptized, along with their parents’ names. These records vary in terms of detail. Some will provide the location where the ceremony occurred and perhaps details of the godparents, though the level of detail will depend on the methodologies used within specific parishes, dioceses, national churches and so forth.
    • Marriage records – Records of when marriage ceremonies were carried out and who the bride and groom were. As with baptismal records the level of detail can vary and in some instances the names of the parents of the bride and groom might be provided.
    • Funeral records – Records of funeral ceremonies and death notices. Along with baptism records and marriage records, funeral records form a sort of triumvir of religious records that allow family historians to trace the broad outline of an individual’s life.[4]
    • Wills – In many jurisdictions wills, or copies thereof, were deposited with the church, notably the consistory ecclesiastical courts of the Church of England. Where available, wills can be very valuable for tracing a person’s family history as they will often provide a lot of biographical detail on the deceased’s parents, children and even grandchildren.[5]
    • Other records – There are other religious records extant today in archives and libraries that can aid the genealogist. These include things like ecclesiastical visitations, where a bishop was ordered to carry out visitations of each parish in his diocese to assess the state of the churches, ministers and spiritual livings there, as well as rentals of church lands. In virtually every country in Europe during the medieval and early modern eras, the church was one of the largest landholders. Records relating to their estates will often contain rentals that will provide many names of people living in a given region.[6]

    Finding religious records

    The National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew, London

    How one goes about finding religious records depends on where they are living or trying to trace an ancestor in. The country involved will have its own arrangements for how religious records have been stored and archived. Let’s take the example of England. Many religious records pertaining to the official, state-sanctioned Church of England will be found in the records office for each county in the country.[7] But the picture is more complicated than this. For instance, many religious records produced by church courts, or indeed any wills that were produced prior to 1858, ended up being sent to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, as the archbishopric of Canterbury had primacy within the Church of England. These records have subsequently ended up at the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew in London.[8]

    To complicate matters further, religious records pertaining to Protestant dissenters such as Baptists, Puritans and Levellers will generally have ended up in the National Archives as well, often stored in different collections. Finally, there is a wide array of other religious records in England which ended up in different locations. Many of the papers of the archbishops and bishops of the country’s dioceses are found today in Lambeth Palace Library in London, across the River Thames from Westminster.[9] The records relating to the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales in the 1530s as part of the English Reformation, which provide a wealth of information on local landholders in the first half of the sixteenth century, are also in the National Archives.[10] Hence, as the English example shows, religious records can end up widely dispersed, though whatever the country they will tend to be in state- or church-run archives of a national or local importance.

    See also

    Explore more about religious records

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/medieval-early-modern-family-history/
    2. ↑ A. B. Wolfe, ‘Population Censuses Before 1790’, in Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 27, No. 180 (December, 1932), pp. 357–370.
    3. ↑ https://www.vaticanlibrary.va/en/home.php
    4. ↑ https://parishregister.co.uk/
    5. ↑ ‘The Making of Wills’, in Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 81–109.
    6. ↑ A. T. Brown, ‘Estate management and institutional constraints in pre-industrial England: the ecclesiastical estates of Durham, c. 1400–1640’, in The Economic History Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (August, 2014), pp. 699–719.
    7. ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/legislation/approved-places-of-deposit/places-of-deposit/
    8. ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/wills-or-administrations-before-1858/
    9. ↑ https://www.lambethpalacelibrary.info/collections/archbishops-archives/
    10. ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/dissolution-monasteries-1536-1540/


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