• Parish Registers are a principal source of information for family historians researching events before the introduction of civil registration of births deaths and marriages in 1837. In Oxfordshire we are fortunate in that the vast majority of the surviving parish registers have been transcribed by volunteers over the years.
• Parish Register Transcripts for all the transcribed parishes are available for purchase from OFHS in the form of Microfiche, and many are now also available in CD-ROM format, in which the transcripts for a number of neighbouring parishes are combined onto a single CD.
  Our transcripts cover almost all the parishes of the historic county of Oxfordshire and most of the former North Berkshire parishes that were transferred to Oxfordshire in the 1974 boundary changes.
  Lists of the available transcipts may be found on our Fiche Sales and CD-ROM Sales pages.
• Monumental Inscription Transcripts are records of the inscriptions writen on tombstones and other monuments in churchyards. Where a readable stone exists it can provide a wealth of genealogical information. Around a third of Oxfordshire's churchyards have been transcribed so far and the work is ongoing, though it is necessarily a slow process. Like the parish register transcripts these MI transcripts are all available for purchase on microfiche. Many of the more recent transcripts are also available on CD-ROM and include photographs of every monument. MI transcripts are included in the lists of available transcripts on our Fiche Sales and CD-ROM Sales pages.
• Oxfordshire Parish Registers and Bishop's Transcripts by Colin Harris is the definitive work of reference describing which registers exist, where they are archived and what transcripts exist. This invaluable book also contains details of which Hundred and Poor Law Union each parish is in and includes a map giving the location of the parishes. It covers all the parishes of present-day Oxfordshire. It is published by OFHS and details are included on our Book Sales page.
• The OFHS Search Service is a finding aid, which helps locate people anywhere within the confines of present-day Oxfordshire. If your ancestors obligingly lived all their lives in one parish, purchasing the transcript for that parish will give you all the information you need. Often however, they moved around within the county. It is then that the Search Service can help you. It is based around a set of computer indexes of Baptisms, Marriages Burials and Monumental Inscriptions. People are indexed by name and age, and the index entry identifies the parish and date for the event. The available indexes are described in detail on our Search Services page.
• Coverage of the Search Service Indexes is not yet complete and the indexes are continually being extended. The Marriage Index is virtually complete for the historic (pre-1974) county of Oxfordshire and also contains most of the former North Berskshire parishes. The Baptism and Burial indexes are both still being compiled by volunteers world-wide. At present they each include around 80% of parishes. The Monumental Inscription Index is complete for all the graveyards that have so far been transcribed (about 50% of parishes), but here the limiting factor is the rate at which the actual graveyards can be recorded. So this index will grow more slowly.
• The Interactive Parish Register Coverage Map provides an up-to-date picture ot the transcripts available and the search service coverage for each of the parishes of present-day Oxfordshire.
• Census Indexes are also included in the Search Service for the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1891 and 1901 censuses. These indexes are complete for all the surviving census records and are described in full on our Search Services page. They are therefore not included in the Parish Register Coverage Map.

• Viewing the Map is best done with a screen resolution of at least 800 x 600 pixels. You will also find it helpful to set your browser into full screen (or "kiosk") mode. With most browsers this can be achieved by pressing the F11 function key. A second press of the same key restores the normal mode, with the toolbars visible.
• The Map shows all of present-day Oxfordshire with parish boundaries indicated as they were around 1900. The parishes of the historic (pre-1974) county of Oxfordshire are coloured yellow, whilst those of the former North Berkshire are coloured pink.
• A Drop-Down List contains all the parishes, in alphabetic order. It provides one way of selecting a specific parish.
• The Results Table shows the transcripts and search facilities available for the selected parish, with the data grouped together in coloured blocks.
• To Select a Parish you have a choice of options:
  1. Click within the outline of the parish on the map.
  2. Open the Drop-Down List by clicking the button, then click on a parish name to select it from the list.
  3. Type the first few letters of the parish name. When you have entered enough to identify the chosen parish uniquely it will be selected. If you pause for more than two seconds between letters, it will be assumed that you are starting a new name.
  4. Use the up and down cursor arrows on your keyboard to step to the previous and next entries in the alphabetic list. (This gives an easy way of stepping through the Oxford City parishes for example.)
• To Identify a Parish on the Map you will find the selected parish is shown in red if you are viewing the page with Internet Explorer. In most other browsers, a red dot will be displayed on or very close to, the selected parish. With some older browsers, it is not possible to achieve even this functionality. With these you can only gauge the approximate location, from the map reference given in the title block of the results table.
• Hover your Mouse Pointer over a parish on the map to display a pop-up box giving the parish name. Most, but not all browsers provide this feature. Note that this feature may cease to work if you have scrolled down the page to the point at which the most northerly parish is no longer included in the visible area of the screen. If you have followed the advice for viewing the map given above, you should not need to scroll down to view the complete map.
• Geographically Small Parishes are not shown individually on the map, so cannot be selected by clicking the map. One of the other methods described above must be used. The same applies to any non-parochial or non-conformist churches. An extreme case of this is the city of Oxford, which is shown as a single outline on the map, but consists of many parishes. When such parishes are selected the red area shown on the map will include the whole area in which the parish lies.

The map and its data are completely self-contained, so if you wish, you may add it to your "favourites" with the "make available off-line" box checked. You will then be able to view the map at leisure without connecting to the internet. However if you do this, you should be aware that the coverage data will soon become out of date as more parishes are added to the index. So you should re-visit the on-line page from time to time.

Finally, as a reward for reading this far, I can reveal that you may in future go straight to the map by clicking the yellow text box at the top of this page, without needing to scroll down to the button at the foot of the page.

• The Heading Block shows the name of the selected parish, together with its historic (i.e.pre 1974) county, and a map reference showing its position on the map.
• The Register Transcript Block shows whether the parish registers have been transcribed and if so in what format or formats the transcript exists. If the transcript is available in CD-ROM form, the Reference Number for the CD containing the transcript is given. (A very small number of parishes are included on more than one CD, in which case either one may be purchased. Each contains the complete transcript). If the transcript is available on CD, it may be assumed that it is also available on microfiche if preferred.
  N.B. The existence of a transcript does not indicate the date range covered nor whether there are any gaps in this coverage. For this level of detail it is necessary to consult the book "Oxfordshire Parish Registers and Bishop's Transcripts" described above.
• The Search Index Block shows which of the parish registers are included in the Search Service Indexes. The number of entries in the index gives an approximate indication of the number of people in the parish. This often bears little resemblance to the area of the parish on the map. Some of the larger rural parishes are often the least populated.
• The Monumental Inscription Transcript & Search Block shows whether the parish churchyard has been transcribed and gives some idea of the number of legible monuments found. It does not indicate whether the transcript is available on microfiche and CD or whether it is only available on microfiche. This can easily be ascertained from the CD-ROM Sales page. The Search Service MI index includes entries from all the churchyards that have been transcribed. So if a transcript exists it may be safely assumed to be included in the search index.
• The Date Range included in the Search Service Indexes is normally less than the full range included in the transcript. In particular, search index coverage stops at 1837 for Oxfordshire marriages and in 1851 for North Berkshire Marriages and for most Baptism and Burial indexes. The displayed numbers will indicate the number of baptisms etc. up to that cut off date.
  For the vast majority of parishes, if the parish is included in a search index, it is safe to assume that all the transcribed entries are in the index. There is a very tiny number of exceptions to this, where for technical reasons a partially-completed index has been included in the search service. The most significant instance of this is Henley, for which the baptism index at present omits the period 1653 to 1834, which is still being checked.

• The interactive parish map, is based on original maps at the Centre For Oxfordshire Studies. These were researched and traced by Howard Fuller and digitised by Malcolm Austen.
• A larger version of this map with parish names and including some parishes in neighbouring counties, is available for download, from this web site. It will be found in the OFHS Web Resources section, where there is also a larger scale map showing the Oxford City parishes.
• Alan Simpson created this interactive version of the map and wrote the rest of the JavaScript used to implement the interactive map page.
• The Transcripts and the Search Service indexes only exist by virtue of the efforts of a great many volunteers. This work is on-going and more help is always welcome. So if you have a little time to spare to help fellow family historians, why not volunteer to help? Most of the indexing can be carried out from microfiche or photocopies, so it is not necessary for you to live near Oxford. Indeed our volunteers come from all over the world. If you are able to help please email our Project Co-ordinator, Hugh Kearsey at projects@ofhs.org.uk   The Oxfordshire Baptism Index is our newest index, where more volunteers are most urgently required. If you would like to help with this project please contact our Baptism Index Co-ordinator, Wendy Archer, directly at baptisms@ofhs.org.uk