Norfolk Bishop's Transcripts - ancestry
 

These are already available on FamilySearch, which has 1,161,877 records transcribed. Unfortunately ancestry doesn't show the number of records on each database on their "New and Updated" page any more, and if you leave all search fields blank, it comes up with zero matches instead of the total number of records like it used to, so I'm not sure whether ancestry have transcribed these themselves or if they just have what FamilySearch have transcribed so far. Both sites also have browse facilities.

Norfolk BT's are unlike other counties in that most years Archdeacon's Transcripts were sent instead, so the BT's for each parish are fairly sparse. Ancestry and FamilySearch both have browse facilities for the AT's.

FreeREG have done a lot of transcriptions of the Norfolk PR's, AT's and BT's, so you may well find an entry on FreeREG and then you can browse to the image on ancestry or FamilySearch using the FreeREG info to find it.

BTs on ancestry
BTs on FamilySearch
ATs browse on ancestry
ATs browse on FamilySearch


My guess is that ancestry have not transcribed or indexed the BT's themselves but are just using FamilySearch's transcriptions (not complete yet), as I would have thought they would index the AT's too if they were doing the work themselves. Let us know if you find evidence to prove or disprove this, please!

I put Norfolk in the Keyword box and the results for this database totalled 1,213,646. If I took out the word Norfolk and replaced it with the word England then the number of results was 2,614,351! There are 14,876 Suffolk entries. Having done a few more searches I realise the vast majority of the rest of the entries (all?) have no place recorded (and many have no date either). It looks like all the entries come up if England is entered in the Keyword box even when the entries don't have 'England' in the results.

In passing I noticed that if you search with a middle name you may not get a result if you put the middle name in the First and Middle Name(s) box, but do get a result if you put the middle name in the Last Name box. This is only sometimes the case though! I just put the middle name in the Keyword box instead.

Thanks for that! Yes, there are a couple of Suffolk parishes included in FamilySearch's Norfolk records. I wonder whether the higher number of records means that ancestry have done some transcribing of their own, or just that they have generated two or three records from each of FamilySearch's (e.g. one record for each spouse in a marriage, extra records for parents named on baptisms, etc)

Without looking I'd go for the latter!

I just realised that if you go into ancestry's card catalogue, it will show the number of records in each database on there. So from now on, I will be checking the new databases out that way!

I urgently need you to determine why my 'England' search showed 2,614,351 - 57 fewer than the card catalogue number (2,614,408) !!!!! :D

If only there was some way of excluding all the "England" records from the search, we could see what was left!

lol!!

Most seem to be the recent BTs (when the ATs ended)

They ought to be easier to read, but the parish for this one (which I recognised!) is wrong:

http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/98...nSearchResults

These have been updated and there are now 2.6 million records, though not as many as in ancestry's other database of Norfolk BT's and AT's. But the transcriptions for this database are probably better since they have been done by FamilySearch.