Search Surrey, Southwark Marriages and Banns
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Did your ancestors marry in one of Southwark’s bustling riverside parishes, or in a chapel serving its growing Victorian communities? This collection, digitised in partnership with Southwark Archives, invites family historians to delve into the lives of the people who lived, worked and worshipped across the borough during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The parish marriage and banns registers include Anglican, Baptist, Congregational and Methodist congregations from areas such as Bermondsey, Borough, Camberwell and Peckham.
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What can these records tell me?
Each search result provides a transcription of the original document and a digital image of that document. The exact information contained within any one entry may depend both upon the date and place and upon the customs and beliefs of the denomination registering the event. However, you should be able to find out a combination of the following:
Names of bride and groom
Marriage date
Marriage place
Age, marital status, occupation, residence etc
Father’s name
Discover more about these records
These records were digitised in partnership with Southwark Archives, the archive serving the London Borough of Southwark. This area of London south of the Thames was part of the historical and ceremonial county of Surrey, but its importance to the social and cultural functioning of the City has always been recognised. As it was situated outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, it also enjoyed a reputation for counter-cultural tendencies, such as when, in Shakespeare’s day, playhouses sprang up alongside the many inns, bowling alleys, gambling dens and other venues we are too polite to mention.
This collection of parish marriage registers and banns registers include both Anglican and Non-Conformist, or Dissenting, denominations of Southwark. These mainly cover the C19th and early C20th and are drawn from Anglican, Baptist, Congregational (Independent) and Methodist chapels across different parts of the borough. Generally, before the appearance of civil registration in England & Wales in 1837, Non-Conformist congregations created marriage registers not too dissimilar from those generated by the Established Anglican Church and its Roman Catholic counterpart; while from the summer of 1837 they used the familiar landscape-format registers usually recording two marriages per page.
The marriage collection includes a number of Baptist and Methodist congregations which were located in the London Borough of Southwark. These include chapels near the River Thames in Bermondsey and Borough but also others in Camberwell and Peckham, to the south of the Borough.
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