Documents In Depth - #9 - Post-1813 burial register

Printed burial registers were introduced on 1 January 1813 under the terms of Rose’s Parish Register Act of 1812, which also required the use of printed baptismal and marriage registers by the Church of England. Before 1837, these registers represented the only legally-recognised records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales.

The aim of the legislation was to standardise the information recorded in burial registers but the bar was set quite low and the resultant records are severely lacking in meaningful genealogical detail. In fact post-1813 burial records are often