Some records are arranged by place, so you will need to have some idea of where your ancestors lived to search them.īetween the 16th and 19th centuries, people holding public office were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown and the Protestant succession. Read our guides on civil litigants and courts of law to get started with your research. Read our guide on Treasury Board: letters and papers 1557–1920 for information on these records.įinally, lawsuits are a great source of information about individual people. Use the Calendars of Treasury Books and Papers to locate records of the economic life of the nation. You can search for translations of public and private acts in the parliament rolls (C 65) on the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England website.
charter rolls in C 53, which contain grants of property in the presence of witnesses.fine rolls in C 60, which include grants of wardship and marriage.patent rolls in C 66, which contain grants of land and wardship.State Paper Office records (up to 1782) – many of these have been digitised and are available on the State Papers Online ( £) website, and you can find calendars on the British History Online websiteĪlso consult the various types of parchment rolls from the Court of Chancery (13th century onwards), in particular:.records of land conveyances (13th century onwards) and Crown, church and royalist lands (1642–1660).records of Crown wardship of male heirs under 21 and female heirs under 14 (1540–1645).Inquisitions post mortem (1236–c.1640), which give details of people who held land directly from the Crown.Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills (1384–1858).However, if you are looking for a person’s name, some types of records are likely to be useful to you because they are particularly rich in names. different surnames for the same individual could be used in different contexts and even a fairly distinctive surname may be difficult to trace.surnames were not always used, nor invariably passed from parent to child.the use of surnames became widespread by about 1300, but there was no consistency in spelling.Tracing people by name in documents may not be easy because: We will not translate or read documents on your behalf. Alternatively you may wish to consult published sources for further guidance. Use our tutorials on Reading old documents to help you decipher the records. the terminology and contemporary meanings of words may be difficult to understand.the handwriting and letter forms are very different from those of the present day alphabet.
the use of English starts to become more common in informal documents in the late 15th century, but Latin was used in formal records until 1733 (except during the Interregnum).they are usually in a highly abbreviated form of Latin.Medieval records are generally much more difficult to use than those from the 16th century and later.
Watch our webinar on an introduction to medieval and early modern sources for family historians for an overview of the sources available at The National Archives and elsewhere. You will find lists of publications at the end of this guide. Many medieval records have been published, or have detailed lists, calendars and indexes, and these published sources are often the best place to start. However, cataloguing is ongoing, so it is always worth doing a search. Try searching Discovery, our catalogue for a name, a place or another keyword and refine your search by date range.Īny online search may be speculative or lengthy because many medieval and early modern records have not been digitised, or catalogued in detail. However, many other records which contain genealogical information start well before 1538, and continue long after. In general, archival records contain information about wealthier landowning members of society, so most ordinary people are less well documented.īefore 1538, when parish registers began, births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials were not officially recorded, though some notes may have been kept by the priest. Information about ordinary people’s lives does exist, but it often occurs in records created for other purposes.