FHS indexes

We have completed two projects with two different family history societies and have made these available here. They are:-

Warwick burial slips

Burial slips are single page forms used to record the administrative details of a burial – to identify the deceased like name, address, occupation; the service, grave size, grave location; and so on. Some slips have personal notes scribbled on them, and many have accompanying documentation (like certification, correspondence, etc.) which provide additional information. BMSGH volunteers created a name and surname index which can be searched from this site. We believe that we have scanned slips for all burials in the period, so this is – in effect – a burial index for Warwick Cemetery for the period.

Poor Law Index

The Poor Law governed the way in which Parishes provided welfare to the poor and dispossessed in their parishes. The original Poor Law dated from the period of Elizabeth I, and remained in force until the early 20th century.

The index on this web site covers the records held in various Warwickshire archvies, and covers the period up to 1834. It is the result of the hard work of many volunteers from the Coventry Family History Society.

Firstly, Barbara Robinson spent many hours over a periof of 13 years scouring the archives and record offices in Warwickshire for Poor Law records (including Birmingham), and has transcribed the key details onto the sheets which are reproduced here with her kind permission. The handwritten transcriptions, which run to around 1,600 pages, were originally bound in 12 volumes. Each transcription contains all the information from the original certificate, including names, dates, names of parishes, family, employers, masters, plus the accession number of the bundle of certificates and the name of the place of deposit.

Secondly, a number of volunteers from the Society have produced a surname index of these transcriptions – which makes it (as far as we are aware) the only complete index to Poor Law Records to be found for Warwickshire. It is indeed a valuable resource.