York St Mary Bishophill the Elder, Yorkshire Genealogy

Guide to York St Mary Bishophill the Elder, Yorkshire ancestry, family history, and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

Parish History
YORK, a city and county of itself, having exclusive jurisdiction, and the head of a union, locally in the E. riding of York, of which it is the capital, 193 miles (N. N. W.) from London; containing 28,842 inhabitants. This link provides a listing of Parishes in the city.

York St Mary Bishophill Senior is an Ancient Parish and a market town in the county of Yorkshire. Other places in the parish include: Middlethorpe and Dringhouses. Wesleyan Methodist is the only identified non-Church of England denomination in York St Mary Bishophill Senior. The following non-Church of England denominations were located somewhere in York, but the exact parish has not been identified: Baptist, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Countess of Huntingdon Methodist, and General Baptist.

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

Civil Registration
Records from York Registration District held at York are included in the online index available at Yorkshire BMD for post 1837 events; view the coverage table to check progress on the availability of index search.

Marriages include


 * Church of England marriages.
 * Civil Marriages at register offices, or non-conformist churches where a registrar was required to be present at the ceremony.
 * Authorised Person marriages. These cover the non-conformist places of worship which applied to keep their own registers as a result of the Marriage Act, 1898 (bringing them into line with Jewish and Quaker marriages which had this status since 1837). In such cases an 'Authorised Person' (usually the minister or priest) recorded the ceremony instead of the registrar. Earlier weddings in these places would be included with civil marriage registers.

A secondary index of Birth, marriages and deaths were kept by the government, from July 1837 to the present day. The civil registration article tells more about these. There are several Internet sites with name lists or indexes. A popular site is FreeBMD however this secondary index may omit the event and may not contain the detail of the Yorkshire BMD index

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

Link to the Family History Library film numbers in their collection St. Mary Bishopshill the Elder - 1598

Probate records
Records of wills, administrations, inventories, indexes, etc. were filed by the court with jurisdiction over this parish. Go to Yorkshire 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