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"Berkshire, an inland county of England, on the south bank of the River Thames, having Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire on the north, Hampshire on the south, Surrey on the south-east, and Wiltshire on the west. Berkshire is irregular in shape, with an extreme length of 43 miles from east to west, and an extreme breadth of 30 miles from north to south, and an area of 462,210 acres. There is a chalk ridge running through the county, joining the Chiltern Hills and the Marlborough Downs...
The county has three parliamentary divisions (returning each one member), seven municipal boroughs, twenty hundreds, and one hundred and ninety-three parishes...
The historic castle and royal borough of Windsor require a special notice. Berkshire had a great share in the [English] Civil War, two battles having been fought at Newbury, Reading having been besieged, and attacks made on Windsor Castle, Abingdon and Donnington. There are many ancient churches with good examples of Norman and later architectural periods, and mitred Benedictine abbots lived at Reading and Abingdon respectively." (From Cassell's Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, 1899)
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Most local history and genealogical records for Berkshire can be consulted at
Berkshire Record Office (BRO): 9 Coley Avenue
Reading
Berks RG1 6AFTelephone: +44 (0)118 901 5132
Fax: +44 (0)118 901 5131
E-mail: ARCH@Reading.gov.uk
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers a wide range of genealogical resources at its Family History Center in Reading (280 The Mead Way, Tilehurst, Reading, Berkshire, Tel: 01189 410211)
Other record repositories and organisations that may hold Berkshire records or copies thereof (and which are mentioned as appropriate on individual Parish pages):
The Berkshire Family History Society Monumental Inscriptions for Berkshire cover a number of cemeteries and many war memorials in the county.
The Berkshire Family History Society has completed a full index and transcript of the 1851 census of Berkshire and is now engaged in transcribing the 1871 census.
The Clergy of the Church of England Database will ultimately contain information on the careers of all Church of England clergymen between 1540 and 1835. Resources include background information on particular dioceses, including the Diocese of Salisbury and the Diocese of Oxford.
In the Thames Valley Papists, Tony Hadlands "tells the story of the Catholics of the Thames Valley from Henry VIII's break with Rome until Catholic Emancipation nearly three hundred years later."
The Archdeaconry of Berkshire was part of the Diocese of Salisbury until 1836 when it was transferred to the Diocese of Oxford. As a result of this, Bishop's Transcripts and items, such as some wills, which came under the jurisdiction of the diocesesan courts are found in the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office or the Oxford Archives at Oxford. There are several 'peculiar' jurisdictions.
A comprehensive listing of Parish Registers, Monumental Inscriptions and transcripts can be found in the "National Index of Parish Registers Volume 8 Part 1 - Berkshire, 2nd edition," compiled by Anthony Wilcox and published by the Society of Genealogists in 2003.
The Berkshire Record Office Web site features an online guide to holdings of parish and non-parochial registers for baptisms/births, marriages, and burials/deaths. The guide covers all parishes past and present in the Archdeaconry of Berkshire and parishes in the Archdeaconry of Buckinghamshire that are within the present Berkshire borders.
The Berkshire Family History Society is compiling a Berkshire Marriage Index containing marriages from 1538 to 1837. Parishes that were formerly in Berkshire and now in Oxfordshire are on the North Berks Marriage Index compiled by the Oxfordshire Family History Society.
The Berkshire Family History Society is compiling a Berkshire Burial Index, which as of October 2006 contained more than 460,000 entries, estimated to be some 75% of the ultimate expected number of entries.
Parish Register transcriptions on microfiche published by the Oxfordshire Family History Society include the Parishes of North Berkshire (i.e., those Parishes that were formerly in Berkshire and are now in Oxfordshire). The OFHS issues many these transcriptions on CD.
The Berkshire Family History Society has published transcripts of a number of Parish Registers on microfiche and CD.
Ted Wildy's UK Marriage witness index entries for Berkshire [ ftp ].
Information on the location of Quaker Records in Berkshire provided by the Quaker FHS.
Parish register copies (Berkshire) in the library of the Society of Genealogists.
Brett Langston has provided details of the Registration Districts in Berkshire for the period 1837 to 1930.
The Berkshire Family History Society maintains a list of present day Registrars of Births, Deaths and Marriages.
Berkshire in Pigot's 1830 Directory
Berkshire in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868), transcribed by Colin Hinson
The University of Leicester's online Historical Directories collection includes Kelly's Directories of Berkshire from 1848, 1887 and 1899, the Berkshire Commercial Directory from 1833, and Slate's Directory of Berkshire from 1852.
Sue O'Neill's searchable Trade Directory Index covers Pigot's directories of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Co Durham, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Westmoreland, Wiltshire and Worcestershire for 1830. Also included in this database is Slater's 1854 Trade Directory of Durham County and the English Electoral Polls.
Direct Resources have provided Surname Indexes to several Trade Directories of around 1848. The 1847 index for Berkshire includes 4,641 surnames and can be downloaded as text or Excel files. Berks1 (Excel) and Berks1 (Text) cover Abingdon, Faringdon, Hungerford and Newbury, and Berks2 (Excel) and Berks2 (Text) cover Reading, Wantage, and Wokingham.
British-Genealogy.com features a list of County Directories for Berkshire.
Researchers may be interested in the Berkshire Genweb pages.
Margaret Young is collecting Berkshire strays on behalf of the Berkshire Family History Society.
IGI Batch Numbers for Berkshire, courtesy of Hugh Wallis.
John Fuller has provided links to mailing lists that serve the county of Berkshire. Alternatively, it is possible to subscribe and unsubscribe to the lists or browse and search the list archives on the BERKSHIRE orWESSEX-PLUS mailing list pages.
There are also two online fora that serve the county of Berkshire, the county-wide forum at British-Genealogy.com and the Berkshire section of Rootschat.com.
The Berkshire Family History Society maintains an alphabetic list of Members Name Interests that includes over 4,000 surname interests for Berkshire.
The Berkshire Family History Society also maintains a surname index to names and events in Birth Briefs, five-generation ancestral (i.e. pedigree) charts submitted by members of the society.
List of Berkshire hundreds, the historical sub-divisions of counties, introduced in the 10th century primarily as a unit of taxation but also having administrative, judicial and military functions.
The local government reorganisation of 1974 brought major changes to the boundaries of Berkshire with parts being lost to Oxfordshire and others gained from Buckinghamshire. Further changes in 1998 finally abolished Berkshire as an administrative unit and replaced it with six "Unitary Authorities" - Bracknell Forest, Reading, Slough, West Berkshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, and Wokingham.
N.B. Information on GENUKI pages is organised on the basis of the pre-1974 counties.
New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire, a joint project by the Berkshire Record Office and the Museum of English Rural Life, makes use of the latest digital technologies to display historic manuscript maps and land awards and thus document the process of enclosing the common fields of the county of Berkshire between 1738 and 1883.
British History Online has published Volumes 2, 3 and 4 of the Victoria County History of Berkshire.
Perhaps the most famous history of Berkshire is included in Volume 1 of Magna Britannia by the Rev. Daniel Lysons and his brother Samuel Lysons, published in 1806 and re-issued in 1813. This volume is also available from Archive CD Books.
A more recent history is A History of Berkshire by Dr. Judith Hunter, published by Phillimore in 1995.
David Nash Ford, History Editor at Britannia.com is the author of Royal Berkshire History, a Website "featuring details of all aspects of the Royal County's fascinating & historic past."
The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, "an evolving electronic archive of British and Irish Romanesque stone sculpture," contains a section on Berkshire.
Berkshire Record Office holds 6 inch and 25 inch Ordnance Survey sheets from the first edition in the 1870s to the 1930s as well as earlier tithe and inclosure maps, and manuscript and printed maps, indexed by place.
Berkshire Record Office and Berkshire Family History Society have produced a CD of the fifty-one 6 inch maps of Berkshire published by the Ordnance Survey between 1881-1887.
Digital Ordnance Survey maps of Berkshire in the mid 19th century are available online at old-maps.co.uk.
A collection of 14th-19th century maps of Berkshire is provided by Genmaps "for the personal use of genealogists and historians for study."
Historical maps of Berkshire are also available on a Web site hosted by David Ford at www.yourmapsonline.org.uk/
The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies produces a Parish Map of Berkshire giving the name of each parish and showing parochial boundaries and probate jurisdiction in colour. The map is also available from the Berkshire Family History Society.
The Hundreds of Berkshire
Extra-parochial places for Berkshire
Berkshire place-names and landowners in Domesday Book Online
The Clergy of the Church of England Database will ultimately contain information on the careers of all Church of England clergymen between 1540 and 1835.
Richard Heaton has published an index of over 13,000 surnames culled from more than 200 stories printed in the Windsor and Eton Express between 1826 and 1842.
Berkshire Old and New is published annually by the Berkshire Local History Association.
The Berkshire Family Historian is published quarterly by the Berkshire Family History Society.
See the chapter on Berkshire on Peter Higginbotham's The Story of Workhouses Web site at http://www.workhouses.org.uk/.
As Berkshire was an archdeaconry in the diocese of Salisbury in the archdiocese of Canterbury, until it was transferred to the diocese of Oxford in 1836, Wills, Administrations and other probate records (prior to 1858) will be found in the Record Office related to the ecclesiastical court where the will was proved. For the archdiaconal court this is Berkshire Record Office near Reading, for the Consistory Court of Salisbury this is the Wiltshire Record Office in Trowbridge, and for the Prerogative Court of Canterbury this is the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane.
Unfortunately, for various 'peculiars' the records may be elsewhere, such as the Bodleian Library at Oxford for Langford, Wantage (early), Hungerford, West Ilsley and Shalbourne. Wills for the few inhabitants of Windsor Castle are kept at The Aerary in Windsor Castle.
Nick Hidden has provided a collection of about 1000 abstracts of probate documents relating to people residing in the neighbourhood of the towns of Hungerford and Wantage in Berkshire. Since Hungerford is on the County boundary there is some spread into Wiltshire and to a lesser extent into Hampshire and Oxfordshire. The historical period which is covered is from about 1500 up to the establishment of the Probate Registry for England & Wales in 1858.
Indexes (or Calendars) to post-1858 wills and admons for England and Wales (also known as the National Probate index) can be found at the Berkshire Record Office. The indexes are available up to 1943.
Berkshire Towns and Parishes are listed on a separate page.
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