Surrey Parish Registers at Ancestry & Findmypast

[Pauline]

I have been doing a lot of research into my Surrey ancestors recently and making use of the Surrey History Centre collection at Ancestry.

However, many of the digitised parish registers there have black and white images which makes some pages very difficult to read. Thus quite a few entries have either not been transcribed or have been transcribed incorrectly.

In many cases there are considerably better colour images at FMP - but quite a few of the registers there have not been transcribed at all. Consequently, despite using both of these sites, many of the folk I've been looking for do not show up in a search, but are nevertheless recorded in the registers and can be found by browsing.

Other more seasoned Surrey researchers may perhaps already be aware of this but I thought it was worth mentioning for the benefit of anyone else unaware of this.

 

[Pauline]

It seems that FMP have now released transcriptions for at least some of the Surrey registers that were not previously transcribed there. I haven't looked in any detail as yet but since their images of these registers are generally much better than those at Ancestry, hopefully their transcriptions will be too.

 

[peter]

hopefully their transcriptions will be too

By and large Findmypast's parish register transcriptions are better, especially for the older records. I'd be interested to know how extensive FMPs coverage is now because I have some 'brick walls' in Surrey which I can't knock down using Ancestry.

EDIT: I think I've knocked down one of my 'brick walls' already - a promising start.