Sonning, Berkshire Genealogy

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

Parish History
SONNING (St. Andrew), a parish, in the union of Wokingham, partly in the hundred of Binfield, county of Oxford, but chiefly in the hundreds of Charlton and Sonning, county of Berks, 3½ miles (E. N. E.) from Reading Here is a place of worship for Independents.

Sonning is an Ancient Parish partly in Berkshire and partly in Oxfordshire.

Other places in the parish include: Sandford, Woodley and Sandford, Woodley, and Sonning Town. A more detailed description is available in Genuki.org.uk.

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
Sonning 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.

Non-Conformist Churches

 * Independent/Congregational
 * Primitive Methodist
 * Roman Catholic

Census records
Census records from 1841-1891 are available on film through a Family History Center or at the Family History Library. The first film number is 241205.

To view these census images online, they are available through a number of websites for a fee or free.

■findmypast (fee-based) but free at Family History Centers and the Family History Library and various other libraries. ■Ancestry.co.uk (fee-based) but free at Family History Centers and the Family History Library and various other libraries. The library versions are known as AncestryInstitution.com. ■The Genealogist.co.uk (fee-based) but free at Family History Centers and the Family History Library and various other libraries. ■FreeCen is a free based UK census searches. It is not complete and individuals are always asked to consider helping out with transcriptions.

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

Websites
Sonning in GENUKI