Although the indexes of birth, marriage and death registrations from 1842 onwards provide limited details, they do perform one invaluable function, which is to identify for researchers when and where an ancestor was born, married or died, and to enable them to request a copy of the official certificate.
The Office of the Superintendent Registrar will only provide these certificates if supplied with the name of the party/parties, the parish and the covering dates of the register as well as the page number listed beside the name when ordering a certificate.
How to get a Jersey certificate and what it contains
Births
The indexes of birth records give only the names of the child, which parish it was born in, a range of dates for the register in which it is listed and the page number. That is sufficient information to obtain a birth certificate, which will list parents, father's occupation and sometimes the address where the child was born. Locating an ancestor in an index can in itself help confirm their position in your family tree.
Although the range of dates can be quite wide in some registers, it can be as little as 12 months in each set of St Helier baptism indexes. We will provide a range of page numbers for each set of records, which helps to identify where a particular record falls between the start and end dates for the set.
Locating an ancestor in a birth register can be particularly important if the child was not baptised, or at least not baptised in an Anglican church, for which records are currently included in our database. We will, in due course, be adding Roman Catholic and other non-Anglican records to the database and Jerripedia's indexes, but this work is only just starting and it is anticipated that it will take some time to complete.
Birth registration indexes were transcribed by us in 2015 and added to the database. We did not include St Helier records at the time because our database already included baptisms in the parish over the same period. We have added the St Helier birth indexes to our index page for the parish as page views.
Marriages
The marriage record indexes are probably the least useful to researchers, because all those marrying are indexed alphabetically, meaning that bride and groom are not shown together.
However, if you know the name of either, and have a vague idea of the other person in the marriage, it is possible to locate one in the index to a register covering the likely range of dates within which the marriage happened, and then locate other people for the same page in the same register.
Once again, by identifying where a particular page number appears in the range covered by the set of records, it is possible to estimate the likely year (or in some cases month) in which the marriage was held.
These marriage indexes were not added to Jerripedia family record index pages, but we have added records for marriages at non-Anglican churches. In the case of St Helier, these records also include Registry Office marriages, which have previously not been available anywhere online. They show bride and groom separately, making the records of somewhat limited use, but we have decided that the work involved in presenting them as page views is justified by even limited value to researchers. We are only adding these non-Anglican marriages because the Church of England marriages would only be a duplicate of those already in our database and indexes from church records.
The page views of indexes are also available to subscribers to the Jersey Archive online catalogue, but if all you are trying to do is locate a register and page number before requesting a certificate, the combined cost of a subscription and the fee for the certificate exceeds £50 - a very expensive way of obtaining family data.
Deaths
Although death records indexes show only the names of the deceased, the range of dates for the register concerned and the page number, this is not much less than is shown in the register.
We have previously included page views of the parish death register indexes but these were relegated to our old index pages when records of Anglican church burials were added to the site in 2017. The death records have now been returned to the main parish indexes.
The death records include those who were buried in non-Anglican churchyards, including, in later years, those whose ashes were interred at the Crematorium.
Dates covered
All birth, marriage and death indexes start in 1842, or later for marriage records in certain parishes in which there were no ceremonies until a later date at a non-Anglican church.
The end dates for each parish depend on which registers have been closed and are now publicly available.
