Yesterday's Names - Family History and Genealogy

Sample Data

Yesterday's Names - helping you discover more about the lives of your ancestors

Parish magazines were published, usually monthly, from the late 19^th century, as a means of informing parishioners about Church services and other Church related events in the parish. They vary greatly in content between different parishes, some containing very little information of interest to family history researchers, others containing vast amounts of useful data that can provide vital clues.

Most parish magazines list baptisms, marriages, and burials, with varying degrees of detail, but they often also give details of other events, such as prizes awarded at Sunday schools, names of players in local cricket matches, winners at flower shows, etc. They also frequently list the names of people who made donations to various Church funds. Although parish magazines tend to concentrate on the deeds of the clergy, church workers, and parish gentry, whose lives were very closely interwoven with the Church, they do also sometimes contain fascinating snippets of information about ordinary parishioners.

At Yesterday's Names, we produce CDs from parish magazines, for use by family history researchers. These are intended to help identify potential further avenues of research, or to add snippets of background information about individuals. In some cases we produce CDs from other church-produced booklets such as church manuals.

The documents on our CDs are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, and a copy of Adobe Reader is included on each CD. We produce two different types of CD based on parish magazines:-

Index CDs : Some of our CDs contain lists of names found in the magazines, together with a brief description of each reference. These CDs usually also contain a selection of articles transcribed from the magazines. They are NOT a full transcription of the magazines, and do NOT contain scanned images of the magazine pages. The data is fully searchable using Adobe Reader. Click the button on the left for more information and examples.

Image CDs : The other type of CDs that we produce contain scanned images of the magazine pages, together with a simple name/page index. The name index section on these CDs is fully searchable using Adobe Acrobat Reader, but the scanned page images are not. Click the button on the left for more information and examples.