Gloucestershire Parish Registers - ancestry
 

With images. Doesn't include Bristol.

Gloucestershire Baptisms, Marriages and Burials 1538-1813

Gloucestershire Baptisms 1813-1913

Gloucestershire Marriages 1754-1938

Gloucestershire Burials 1813-1988

Gloucestershire Confirmations 1834-1913

Thanks for that Kite. It should be useful.

Brilliant Kate, thanks!

I've been able to confirm the bigamous marriage of one of OH's, and the birth of a son to that marriage.

I was surprised that Prosser had been transcribed as Proper - I'd have expected the transcribers to have been aware of the common fs substitute for ss.

Viv once kindly photocopied a load of correspondence for me at Somerset RO, including a wonderful letter from the groom's sister to his existing wife telling her "he has married another". Unknown to all his family, that marriage was also bigamous as he had a wife in the US at the time!

The groom returned to his Somerset wife long enough to have two more children before deserting her again, but I've never been able to find out what happened to the Gloucestershire bride.

Sorry to say it has ancestry's usual poor standard of transcription. I've already submitted numerous corrections for the few records I've looked at. Though to be fair, I was looking at 17th century records.

I was just looking at a page where you could also see the dates from the page before and every single entry has been mistranscribed.

Also the Stinchcombe composite register is there, but it hasn't been indexed. Not sure if that's a one-off omission or they haven't finished indexing.

I'm currently looking at 17th-century records for another county, and Ancestry's transcriptions are appalling. Apart from mistranscribed names, a whole page has been entered under the wrong year. The odd thing is that the FamilySearch transcriptions for the same records are good, although they're all done by volunteers, whereas Ancestry's transcribers are presumably paid.

I expect the paid transcribers are expected to complete a certain number of records per hour and don't get much time to ponder over the handwriting, whereas volunteers can spend ages deciphering each record till they are satisfied with it.

The composite registers look like BTs to me. All in the same hand and they include marriages from post 1754 (which are duplicated in the new style registers).

I expect that's true, but you'd think they'd get some kind of training in old handwriting. Many of the mistakes I've seen were glaringly obvious.

The two I looked at both needed corrections - the second one was a glaringly obvious "i", rather than the transcribed "e".

There are many Propers in the marriages and baptisms. The ones I've since viewed would all appear to be Prossers.

It's great to have the records available online but I'm glad I've been using Ancestry long enough to be able allow for mistranscriptions in my searches. My annoyance at the fact that the paid for product is so often substandard never lessens!