Parish Records key explanation


To get all of this information onto the page we've had to reduce the width of many of the columns so here is a key to those consequent abbreviations -

A. the 'ch' column refers to the particular village church where the event occurred. So ' SM' is for St Mary's,
    'IN' for the Independent or 'CA' for the Catholic church

B  'pl' stands for the place of the event - 'HM' is Henham, 'SW' for Saffron Walden, 'UG' for Ugley, 'MA' for
     Massachusetts, 'GC'  for Great Canfield, 'PL' for Pledgden, 'ST' for Stansted, 'BR' for Broxted.   

C  the source column -

    1. all entries taken from the parish register are shown in BLUE and marked 'PR'.
    2. all entries taken from the IGI are shown in BLACK as 'IGI'   
    3. If the same record has been found in both the parish register and the IGI, that fact is shown in RED as
        'PR & IGI'
    4. If the data has been supplied by another source, normally the family, it is shown in GREEN as 'F'


The consequences of this colour coding (the amount still left in blue indicating that the record has not been found in the IGI, or that still in black cannot be found in the actual register), show just how poor the IGI can be and how important it is to examine the original parish registers when doing your own family history research.