About this site

Many people transcribe the parish registers of Somerset and for that I thank them. In my research I have found that they willingly upload their hard work to many different places on the internet.

Transcriptions are stored on the various Yahoo Groups pages, FreeReg, Somerset OPC, wsom website and the genealogical societies. The same transcription is stored in one or more of these places.

To try to help with researching your ancestors I have created this site which shows the distribution of surnames across the Somerset parishes and the year that they are recorded in the parish register.

This site does not store any transcriptions but can be used to research the movement of your somerset ancestors. It can also show that there is a transcription of that parish and surname on one of the on-line sites above.

Details of what is contained on each page

Home: This page that you are currently viewing.

Search Surnames: This page allows you to enter your surname of interest. If the database contains any details about the distribution of the surname it will be shown here. This can help to see where your ancestor may have come from or moved to in Somerset. For example my earliest SPENCER ancestor is recorded as marrying in Newton St Loe in 1794. Searching for Spencer on this page shows records for SPENCER in Beckington and Taunton before 1794. A search of these transcriptions may show that my relative migrated from one of those villages to Newton St Loe.

List Surname: This page has an alphabetical list of all the surnames in the database. This will show some variant spellings that may have been used in your ancestors surname and so gives an indication of other records to search for.

Transcriptions: When I started to develop this site I was going to put a database on-line of the location of the transcription for each parish. I found that I would be duplicating the work by Ian Sage on his site. I recommend that you go to his site to find the location of any transcription. This page still contains the details for the A parishes and is correct as at 20th February 2009.

How to update the database

If you have details of surname distribution by parish and that data is in an on-line transcription and not in this database then please email the details using the template here.

Future development will allow authorized users to update the database themselves.