Are you having trouble finding a church record for an ancestor in Jersey, despite the addition of a large number of new records to our family record indexes and our associated database, so that our collection now covers the period from 1540 to 1940?
Why some records may be missing
The start and end dates for parishes vary and a full list of the dates between which records of births, marriages and deaths are available for the 12 parish churches, and seven other Church of England churches, can be found on our page which explains why some records may still be missing.
If it is our fault that a record has been missed, we want to find out about it and add it to the collection, and free service we have offered since 2017 is helping us to do this, and has helped many of our users to find an elusive ancestor and break down a brick wall in researching their family tree.
This is how it works: Send us an email with the name of an ancestor you have failed to find, and we will search our database using advanced search facilities not yet available to users, and use our extensive knowledge of Jersey names, and how they are sometimes wrongly transcribed, to search the church registers themselves.
If we find your ancestor, we will let you know everything which is included in the entry in the church register.
If you have found an ancestor in our database or the Jerripedia A-Z family record indexes, you may be wondering if there is any more information in the register entry, but will not be able to look for yourself unless you have an Ancestry subscription or access to a library with a community subscription.
We will look in the registers for Jerripedia users as and when time permits, but these requests will not be given the same priority as searches for records not found where they might be expected to be in our database and indexes.
This is how it works
Now there are two ways of seeking help.
You can join our Facebook group and post any type of question there. Just go to your Facebook account, or create a new one, and search for Jerripedia. Ask to join the group and wait a short time for approval, after which you will be able to post your own queries and join in other discussions.
Or, end an email to editorial@jerripedia.org and use 'Jerripedia ancestor search' as the subject of your email. If you do not use this as a subject, your email may get lost in our spam filter and we can only act upon emails correctly addressed with this subject. In your email tell as as much as you can about the ancestor you are looking for – full names; approximate years of baptism, marriage and/or burial; parish, if known; names and dates of any known relatives. The more information you provide, the greater the chance of our finding that elusive record. Use the spellings you believe to be correct, and provide alternatives if the family name or personal name might have been spelt differently. Also include your own name in the email.
If you know the name, date and parish for a record and simply want us to look up more information for you, tell us this. We will look for the record the next time we access the particular register.
Searches for records which appear to be missing will be given a higher priority, but as an incentive to jump nearer the top of the queue for both types of search, if you are able when submitting your request to point out any errors you think you have found in other records while searching for your ancestors, let us have the details and we will, in return, give your request greater priority.
If you can help us correct errors and find missing records, we will be delighted to help you.
This service is limited to one request from a particular email address at any time, and is not a gateway to a wider search for information about ancestors, which will often be found already included in our pages. However, our Facebook page is just waiting for any type of inquiry, and there will be many helpers ready and willing to point your research in the right direction
