Essex Record Office completes online parish record collection

The following is an announcement from the Essex Record Office:

ERO’s online subscription service for digital images of Essex parish registers and wills, has undergone its next major update.  The service now includes parish registers from the ancient parishes of Chingford, Leyton and Walthamstow, and many of the newer parishes established as this area was built up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

These registers are held by Waltham Forest Archives at Vestry House in Walthamstow and were loaned to ERO for digitisation.  In all, ERO has copied another 473 registers, producing over 67,000 images, completing coverage of the whole of historic Essex and pushing the total number of Essex parish register images to over 580,000. 

You can either subscribe to use the service from home, or take advantage of the free onsite available to visitors to the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford and to its Access Points at Saffron Walden and Harlow.  It will shortly be provided at Waltham Forest Archives.  Opening hours vary, so please check before you visit. 

Please note that marriages after 1957 are not included, and not every single register has survived or been deposited with ERO.  Before you subscribe please check that the documents you need exist and have been digitised.

As the ERO takes pains to point out, these are unindexed records and arranged by church which means often searching through the records of several churches, especially in larger communities. They recommend using other sources to attempt to limit the amount you have to read through and only taking out a 24 hour subscription initially.