Holy Island, Northumberland Genealogy

Guide to Holy Island, Northumberland ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
HOLY-ISLAND, anciently Lindisfarn (St. John the Evangelist), a parish, in the union of Berwick, in Islandshire, N. division of Northumberland, 5½ miles (N. by E.) from Belford, and 10 (S. E.) from Berwick. The church is a small neat edifice.

Additional information:

Holy Island is a parish comprising Holy Island, Fenham and Goswick on the Northumberland coast. The church of St. Mary the Virgin is an ancient parish.

Civil Registration
Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these records. There are several Internet sites with name lists or indexes. A popular site is FreeBMD.

Church Records
 parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials are available online for the following years:

Records of baptisms 1578-1960, marriages 1578-1958 and burials 1578-1959 are available at Northumberland Collections Service.

Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections DDR/EA/PBT/2/139 1765-1868. The parish is historically recorded as North Durham until 1844 then as Northumberland. North Durham references in the Durham Bishop’s Transcripts collection 1700-1900

Parish Register transcripts are available to search free online at Family Search Historical Records.

The dates of the post-1760 transcripts have been noted in detail and sometimes only cover years. For most parishes in the collection there are gaps in the sequence of transcripts. It is advisable to consult the original parish registers for these years and events.

Non Conformist Records

 * 1613-1920 at FamilySearch - How to Use this Collection; index (dates may vary by parish)

Poor Law Unions
Berwick Poor Law Union, Northumberland

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Northumberland Probate Records to find the name of the court having primary jurisdiction. Scroll down in the article to the section Court Jurisdictions by Parish.

Maps and Gazetteers
Maps are a visual look at the locations in England. Gazetteers contain brief summaries about a place.


 * England Jurisdictions 1851
 * Vision of Britain