Helston, Cornwall Genealogy

Guide to Helston, Cornwall ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
HELSTON, or Helleston (St. Michael), a borough and market-town, and the head of a union, in the parish of Wendron, possessing separate jurisdiction, but locally in the hundred of Kerrier, W. division of Cornwall, 17 miles from Truro, and 279 WSW from London. There are places of worship for Baptists, and Primitive and Wesleyan Methodists.

Civil Registration
Births, 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
Helston parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials are available online for the following years:

To find the names of the neighboring parishes, use England Jurisdictions 1851 Map. In this site, search for the name of the parish, click on the location "pin", click Options and click List contiguous parishes.

Records are also available at the Cornwall Record Office.

Cornwall Online Parish Clerks
The Helston section of the OPC website contains many records.

Poor Law Unions
Helston Poor Law Union

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Cornwall 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
There are many maps and gazetteers showing English places. Valuable web sites are:


 * 1851 Jurisdiction Maps
 * Vision of Britain

Websites
Helston in GENUKI