Parish Finder

Parish Finder helps family history researchers to structure their research by suggesting nearby parishes and towns to search when an ancestor cannot be found in a known place.

It helps you make your research more effective, and helps you make better use of your time.

In years gone by, before the Industrial Revolution, moving from one location to another was limited by transportation options. Before cars and railways, moving long distances took a long time, and was consequently very difficult.

We all know that people did move around, and when researching our family trees we often see a line peter out in one parish, and we struggle to get any further back in time.

For many if not most of our "lost" ancestors, the strong likelihood is that ancestors moved to parishes within a reasonable distance from their home, most probably on foot or by horse.

How does Parish Finder help?

Let's say you are searching for records in Bath. You step back through the records, noting BMD entries, but you exhaust the records. Where do you look next?

Most often the logical thing to do is to search the records of nearby places, but how do you find a list of places to search?

Parish Finder!

Enter a search place and a distance, and Parish Finder will build you a custom research list. You can see the list as pins on a map, or as a list of places.

New! You can now print out the research list to take with you on your research trip.

Parish Finder will also tell you the distance between two places, useful when you want to sense-check potential record matches in online sources, such as Ancestry.

We've all seen matches in Ancestry that look like a perfect fit, but then you realise the records are from a place 200 miles away from your current search area. Parish Finder helps you to easily and quickly check these matches.