Index Coverage

To view the included parishes within a county click a county name in the table below :

There comes a time in our research when we lose the trail. This is usually due to a lack of consideration on the part of our ancestor for we poor searchers of today in that he decided to move without leaving any clues. One of the more common occasions for this was when a young, or not so young, man changed parish to be married. The wedding often took place in the parish of the bride.

This causes a break in the line we are tracing. In an attempt to fill these gaps it would be an advantage if the marriages from the surrounding areas could be gathered together so that they might be searched more easily than leafing through several registers. Part of this work was carried out in the early part of the last century by John Percival BOYD whose name is remembered in his eponymous Index. Unfortunately most of the coverage of Boyd's Marriage Index only extends to 1812 and this leaves a large gap until the start of general registration in 1837.

This database started as an index to cover the years 1813-1837 for the southern part of County Durham where the parishes had not been covered by Boyd's Marriage Index.

It was then extended to cover the years 1800-1812 for non-Boyd County Durham Parishes and then on to North Yorkshire 1813-1837 where Boyd is thinly represented.

Gradually the index evolved into a database and has been accepting marriages for all dates before 1837 from all of parishes.

As you can imagine, collecting this amount of data has been a considerable task, and has kept me well occupied over a period of several years!