West Sussex County Council: Parish Registers

Parish registers are the basic resource for the family historian before 1837 with the parish church having recorded baptisms, marriages and burials, and from 1754 onwards banns.

The original order by which this information was required to be recorded dates from 1538, but very few registers have survived from this date. The majority of parishes, however, have registers which date from before 1600. Whatever the starting date, there are gaps in the period covered by the registers - particularly during the period of the Cival War and the Commonwealth, 1642-1660.

Searchers who have no experience of old documents will find the handwriting of originals up to 1660 difficult to read. The General Alphabet of the Old Law Hands is a useful guide to early handwriting.  You can download the General Alphabet of the Old Law Hands in PDF format. However many parish registers have been transcribed and translated separately and these volumes are freely available on the searchroom shelves for consultation.

To ensure the preservation of the original volumes, the majority of parish registers have now been filmed, and it is the filmed version which will normally be produced for searches.

The list below gives the details of all the parish registers available on microfiche at the Record Office. If the Parish which you wish to consult is not listed then it is most likely that another version, such as microfilm is available.

To find your fiche please consult the list.

Download the Parish Registers list in PDF Format (275Kb)

Help with downloading PDF files

The Record Office has coverage (in the form of originals, Bishop Transcripts, microfiche, microfilm or modern transcripts) for all West and East Sussex parishes from the 16/17th centuries and often well into the 20th. For more information, see Bishops Transcripts.

Microfiche copies of original parish registers can be supplied at £2.50 per fiche.

Microfiche copies of parish registers transcripts can be supplied.