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Does anybody know if someone has made some sort of a database from The Essex Archives Parish Registers for the West Ham district?
Thanks
Angela
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You might have to split West Ham down into parishes.
The Essex FHS seem to have transcribed records for some areas
http://www.esfh.org.uk/churchrecords.php
Have you checked out Familysearch?? Freereg??
http://www.marriage-locator.co.uk/ can be helpful to work out if a post 1837 marriage took place in a church, and which one. It is an on-going project.
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Essex seem to be a bit mingey with their records and you usually have to go to the records office.
I have lots of rellies in Essex West Ham which covers a lot of ground. I searched by Essex West Ham greater London. Essex is a very big county.
Angela can we help at all? If you give us some details I am sure someone on here would be able to find some info for you.
Mel
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http://seax.essexcc.gov.uk/ParishRegisters.aspx
(you can check Parishes on above, if not probably best to contact them perhaps)
http://www.essexrecordoffice.co.uk/contact-us/
http://seax.essexcc.gov.uk/
Chris :)
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Hi All,
Thank you for all your suggestions.
I have taken out a short subscription with Essex Archives online to look at their parish records. The problem is there are so many church books to flick through.
West Ham district covers a huge area in the Parish records... Plaistow, Canning Town,, West Ham, Stratford, Victoria Docks, Forest Gate etc., the list goes on...
I have tried https://familysearch.org/ for England, Essex Parish Registers, 1503-1997, http://www.freereg.org.uk/ and http://www.marriage-locator.co.uk/ for marriages before 1911.
I have a lot of West Ham marriages in my tree and I seem to be looking at the same pages over and over again. ( Lots of names overlapping registered qtr. and year.)
I just wondered if someone had transcribed the parish registers to make it a little easier in locating parish records from Essex Archives.
knowing my luck, the people I'm looking for aren't in the Parish registers they're probably located at the Register Office.
On Tuesday I will give Newham Archives a call to see if they hold Parish Transcripts. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Thank you for your comments.
Angela
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If you look at the Information-Statistics_Districts section in freeBMD it gives you the page ranges used for each registration district for each quarter..
If you know the page number of the marriage you are interested in and compare it with the page range for that district/quarter you can reduce the parishes you need to look at.
If the page number is in the top 70 percent or so it will probably be a register office wedding so the parish records won't help.
The parishes are usually arranged in alphabetical order so if the page number is near the start of the range then the parish name will begin with a letter near the start of the alphabet.
Sometimes the marriage locator can narrow the search to a few parishes.
Also the alphabetic arrangement often ignores words like Little, Great, North, South, East, West in the arrangement. Thus South Leyton would be treated as Leyton South.
When you look through a parish with a marriage in the quarter you are interested in, it can be worth finding the page number of that marriage to compare with the page number you are interested in. That tells you whether the parish you want is earlier or later in the alphabet.
I had a subscription to Essex Ancestors last year and was able to find many marriages by that technique..
I should add that the approximation of 70% refers to about a hundred years ago. In earlier years a much higher percentage of marriages were in parish churches.
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Hi Kense,
Thank you for your comment. I'm struggling to understand how it works.
I've tried looking at a marriage that I've already found to try to understand and either I'm not doing it right or I just cant grasp your explanation. Can you explain it to me "Idiot proof* please?
It took me a long time to find this marriage in Essex Archives. I found it listed under West Ham, All Saints. Here is the Index details. Please explain what I need to do next to narrow down my search for this example so that I may understand?
Name: Angelina E Harms
Spouse Surname: Woodhouse
Date of Registration: Apr-May-Jun 1935
Registration district: West Ham
Inferred County: Essex
Volume Number: 4a
Page Number: 632
I don't have these marriage certificates. My next search would be for
Name Benjamin Dutton
Spouse Surname Ward
Registration Year 1913
Registration Quarter Jan-Feb-Mar
Registration district West Ham
Inferred County Essex
Volume 4a
Page 514
Name Elizabeth B Harms
Spouse Surname Cutts
Date of Registration 1947 - Jan-Feb-Mar[1947]
Registration district West Ham
Inferred County Essex
Volume Number 5a
Page number 1207
I hope you have the time to be teacher.
Thank you.
Angela
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OK I'll start with the page ranges.
Go to the main page of freeBMD and select Information.
Go down the page to Statistics and select Districts
Go down the page to Page Ranges and select the second "here".
Then tab down to West Ham and select that.
You will then have a list of page ranges for Births Marriages and Deaths for each year and quarter since Sep 1837.
For marriages 1935 June it gives a page range of 1 to 1057.
From what I said about 70% being parish weddings and the rest at register offices or other authorised places I would expect your page (632) to be fairly near the high end of the parishes.
Unfortunately West Ham has a lot of sub-districts/parishes beginning with W (Walthamstow, Wanstead Woodford and West Ham itself (which I believe is an exception to what I said about being treated as Ham West).
So I would concentrate on the W parishes and to start with, look at a parish in Woodford. Find a wedding in the same quarter and see what its page number is.
Then it is a matter of trial and error to estimate likely parishes to examine. It is a laborious process but does enable you to rule out many of the parishes in the search.
I'll be back later but have to go now.
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I notice that the Marriage Locator didn't produce any result for the second and third marriages but the one you did know about gave the parishes as being between Upton Park and Barkingside.
Upton Park as a starting point is consistent with the parish beginning with W but Barkingside is confusing. I think it must be because that is the first parish of the district and thus implies that they have no further data for that quarter.
I am not certain but I think West Ham churches may be after all the other parishes in the district.
I see that around 1935 West Ham All Saints Marriage Book lasted 2 years and 1935 was split between two books. Each book is about 250 pages with two entries per page. It does help if you are good at mental arithmetic so that you can make a good estimate of which image to start looking from.
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