Swanage, Dorset Genealogy

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

Parish History
SWANAGE, or Swanwich (St. Mary the Virgin), a village, a parish, and a sub-district, in Wareham district, Dorset. The village stands on S. bay, 9 miles SE of Wareham railway station; was known, at Domesday, as Swanawic or Sonwic. It has two dissenting chapels.

SWANWICH (St. Mary the Virgin), a market town and parish, in the union of Wareham and Purbeck, hundred of Rowbarrow, Wareham division of Dorset, 6 miles (E. S. E.) from Corfe-Castle, and 122 (S. W. by W.) from London. Here are places of worship for Independents and Wesleyans.

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
Swanage 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.

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

 * Swanage OPC - Part of the Dorset OPC network
 * Swanage One-Place Study