Phillimore Parish Registers for Huntingdonshire

William Phillimore set out to transcribe all parish registers, starting with marriages, across the whole of the country. Unfortunately, as with many Grand Schemes, he was hampered by the sheer volume of the task, but Phillimore did manage to make a start in Huntingdonshire.

Family tree research was as popular 100-150 years ago as it is today, but they didn't have the Internet!  You'd have to physically visit each church to inspect its parish registers and go through every line for yourself to check if there were any names that were relevant to your tree.  What Phillimore did was to find 150 subscribers, prepared to pay to receive a printed transcription.  He'd then organise, usually alongside the rector of a parish, for a transcriber to work with the original registers.  Once printed and distributed, the subscribers might then have written back to him with their own corrections and a volume might be republished with corrections.

When Phillimore started to print the parish registers of Huntingdonshire in 1912 he was still seeking the vital investment from subscribers:

"In Huntingdonshire there are 95 parishes having Registers beginning before the nineteenth century.  It is calculated that the Marriage Registers of these can be printed in twelve volumes, of which the present is the first, so that if sufficient financial support is forthcoming to enable two volumes a year to be issued, as in other counties, it is possible to complete the whole county in six years.  To enable this to be done thirty more subscribers are needed.  Fifteen more parishes, including the four comprised in the town of Huntingdon, besides Godmanchester and St Ives, are already transcribed and could be sent to press at once. "

Published in October 1912, Volume 1 Huntingdonshire Parish Registers. Marriages. Edited by WPW Phillimore, MA, BCL and WM Noble, Rector of Wistow, covered the following four parishes:

• Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, 1559-1837
• Little Raveley, Huntingdonshire, 1577-1839
• Bury, Huntingdonshire, 1561-1837
• Wistow, Huntingdonshire, 1604-1837

I have not (yet?) found evidence of any further parishes having been published at future dates.  Phillimore's Atlas and Index of Parish Registers was published with a full list of transcribed registers, but I haven't bought a copy of that yet.  This book was published in 1984 and includes over 1800 parish boundary and other maps and details about parish records and where they can be found.

William Phillimore died in 1913, leaving most of his planned work incomplete. At the time of his death he had published over 200 parish registers and inquisitions - all high quality work that is still used daily by genealogists today.

Huntingdonshire Parish Registers Online:

Only 150 originals were printed - many disappearing into libraries around the world.  You can find a copy of the Phillimore book that has been scanned in, or the records themselves, in a few ways, including, but not limited to local family history groups for the area covered and:

• Archive.org - scanned copies of the parish registers are available online at archive.org
• Ebay - scanned copies are available for sale on ebay in CD/PDF format
• Findmypast has the most parish registers online, making it the best website for searching through BMDs, but I checked for the first name in the Phillimore book and it wasn't present.  FindMyPast are working with the Family History Society and local Family History groups to add transcripts, but they are drip-feeding them into their system as part of their marketing strategy, so they could appear at any point.
• Ancestry.co.uk also didn't seem to contain the first entry.

While FindMyPast and Ancestry are great sites for instantly searching many thousands of registers and documents, they can't contain all information, on everything, immediately/today.  It's always good, therefore, to not rely on them, but to build up your own personal library of information.

I had a quick look through for anybody in the Finding family, but just found one that was over 100 years before the dates I was interested in ... but it's nice to have a copy as you never know what you'll find when you're flicking through the pages!