History of Parish Registers in England and Wales: From the Restoration to Civil Registration
by John Wintrip published by the Lutterworth Press 26th March 2026
We are pleased to highlight the forthcoming publication by IHGS Graduate John Wintrip.
John obtained a DipGen in 2008 and LHG in 2019. Several chapters of his new book are based on his Licentiateship dissertation.
John described his new book below:
I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book: A History of Parish Registers in England and Wales: From the Restoration to Civil Registration on 26 March 2026 by Lutterworth Press.
Early parish registers piqued the interest of several nineteenth-century antiquarian authors, but those of the long eighteenth century, usually the first and sometimes the only parish registers encountered by family historians today, received far less attention. During many years of personal and professional research, I became increasingly aware of features and idiosyncrasies in the registers of this period for which I could find little or no explanation in genealogy manuals. This prompted me to explore their history as a personal project after retiring from professional practice, involving both reviewing the published literature and conducting original research on aspects that had previously been overlooked.
My initial focus was the motivation for the introduction of detailed baptism and burial registers in several dioceses and a few parishes elsewhere towards the end of the eighteenth century. After being awarded an IHGS Licentiateship for my dissertation on this topic in 2019, I continued to investigate other aspects of parish registers that had received little previous attention, including earlier initiatives for their improvement, and the marriage registers introduced following Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753.
The most recent book to cover the history of parish registers in any detail was published in 1968,1 since when a significant amount of new research has been carried out, initially by archivists, historical demographers and local historians, and more recently by me. While my own research was drawing to a close, I began to think about writing a book to synthesise what is now known about the history of these fundamental records into a coherent narrative. As little can be added to what has already been written about the earliest registers, which for many parishes no longer survive, I decided to concentrate on the period after 1660. I was very fortunate in finding a publisher who was sufficiently interested in my proposal to offer me a contract.
This book is intended as a history of the parish registers of the Church of England and is not a practical guide to their use. However, by illuminating the nuanced development of these records, it seeks to lay the foundation for more informed and productive research.
