Essex Family History

The Essex family history page has been created to assist genealogists and family history researchers tracing ancestors who lived or died in in Essex, England, UK. Please read on for links and details of a wide variety of Essex family history resources:

Essex Society for Family History

The Essex Society for Family History is a well resourced family history society based in Chelmsford, Essex with branches in Chelmsford, Colchester, Harlow, Saffron Walden and Southend-on-Sea. The society has a very popular surname search facility which is available to members of the society. Visit Members Surname Interests for more information.

The Essex Record Office

The Essex Record Office holds thousands of documents, maps, photographs, sound recordings and videos. although many records have not yet been digitised, you can subscribe for a modest fee for all the digital archives.

Births, marriages and deaths

FindMyPast (subscription required) contains county specific search pages for a wide range of family history records. These are the relevant links for Essex family history records:

Births

Essex Baptism Index – 1538-1917

Marriages

Essex Banns Index – 1754-1950
Essex Marriage Index – 1538-1900

Burials – including memorial inscriptions

Essex Burial Index – 1530-1950
Essex Memorial Inscriptions – Tombstone Inscriptions

Wills & Probate records

Essex Wills Beneficiaries Index – Wills & Probate Records 1675-1858

Military records

Essex, Clacton Roll Of Honour 1914-1918
This holds records of over 1000 Claction men who died in WW1.

Essex Newspaper Archives

Family historians will often turn their attention to local newspaper archives once the more obvious forms of family history sources (such as BMD or census records) have been exhausted. Newspaper archives can be an invaluable resource for a variety of reasons; the can fill in gaps (regarding dates or locations), confirm what we already know, or paint a more complete picture of the individual who is being researched.

The British Newspaper Archive (subscription required) has digitised a great many local newspapers published in all parts of Britain, dating back to the 1700s. Here is the link to the Newspaper archive for Essex.