Researching your family tree?

Are you interested in family history, or know that your ancestors came from Ware and you’d like to find out more about them?

In the past, and particularly before 1837, people who lived in the town came to church for their children to be baptised (christened), to get married, or to bury the dead. There wasn’t a central system for recording the birth, marriage or death of anybody, so the church registers are often the only written evidence that these things happened.

Registers from past years are regularly sent to Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, where they are stored securely and can be seen by visitors. The most recent burial of ashes register is the only register held on site at St Mary's. For all other records please consult: 

Hertfordshire Archives which is in Hertford, on the County Hall site, and is open four days a week to visitors, who can see older (generally pre-1900) registers on microfilm, without needing to book or pre-order, and 20th century records by arrangement (the registers will be brought out of storage for you, so a little advance notice is helpful).

What can you find out?

The earliest registers (from 1553) recorded baptism, marriage and death in one book. For St Mary’s there are three of these.

After 1754 marriages were recorded separately, and from 1754-1813 the baptisms and burials are in volumes together.

Then from 1813, three different registers for baptism, burial, and marriage.

Once Civil Registration began in 1837, the marriage registers have much more information in them, including the names of the bride’s father and the groom’s father.

Need more detail? 

Do please look at the Hertfordshire Archives website www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/hals - go to “search the archive catalogue”, use the search term “St Mary the Virgin Ware DP/116” and you will be able to look at the catalogue entries for the different registers held at Hertford, and on the home page you can find out how to visit the Archives and the Local Studies Library.

There are a few rules for visiting but these are simply to protect the sources and to make your visit more straightforward – please use only a pencil in the reading rooms, please don’t eat or drink, and please put your bag or case into a locker before coming into the reading rooms.

The staff are friendly and will be very helpful. They have years of experience in looking up family history, and will be able to suggest ways round most common family history hiccups or brick walls.

If you are looking for an ancestor’s grave, the burial register will show if they were buried in the churchyard; but from 1854 St Mary’s churchyard was mostly closed for burials and they then took place in the Ware Cemetery (Ware Town Council has those records). Ashes from cremations are still interred in the churchyard and we do have a burial of ashes register and plan on site at St Mary's. 

When you look at St Mary’s churchyard, of course, you see that many of the memorial stones have been moved to the edges. The graves have not been moved, but there isn’t a simple way of finding out who is buried in which part of the grounds. A plan of the churchyard made in 1978, before the stones were moved, can be viewed at Hertfordshire Archives (document reference DP/116/29/7).

The Hertfordshire Family History Society came to Ware and mapped all the visible gravestones, transcribing the writing as far as possible, and published a volume which lists all the memorials. There are copies of this available to see, or you can buy one, at Hertfordshire Archives.

Not everyone who was buried in the churchyard would have had a memorial, though, as these have always been fairly expensive, so many many people who are buried are simply recorded in the burial register and it may never be possible to find out exactly where.