Nearly five million historic family history records from the East Riding of Yorkshire have now been published online.
Family history website Ancestry has added four sets of records: ‘Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812’ (1,704,137 records); ‘Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1915’ (1,626,919 records); ‘Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1950’ (1,221,741 records); and ‘Church of England Burials, 1813-2000’ (435,339 records).
All the collections are indexed and searchable and include digitised images of the original records from East Riding Archives.
This means Ancestry is now the only family history website with parish records for the whole of Yorkshire, as it already has records for North and West Yorkshire as well as the cities of York, Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield and Halifax.
Baptism, marriage and burial records are a crucial resource for tracing ancestors’ births, marriages and deaths, particularly before the introduction of civil registration in 1837.
The record sets include records of famous people from the East Riding. Among them can be found the baptism of Tom George Longstaff, which took place on 22 February 1875 at St Mark’s Church, Hull.
Longstaff was a medical doctor, explorer and mountaineer, who was the first person to climb a summit of over 7000 metres when he climbed the Trisul peaks in the Himalayas in 1907. He was also the chief medical officer and naturalist on the first unsuccessful British expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1922.
The records also include the baptism of Winifred Holtby on 15 July 1898 in Rudston, Yorkshire. Holtby was a writer and feminist and pacifist campaigner. Her novel South Riding, a fictionalised account of life in rural Yorkshire inspired by the East Riding, was published in 1936, the year after her death.
