Family records and historical searches

Herefordshire Registration Service has a record of every birth, death, marriage and civil partnership that has taken place in Herefordshire since 1 July 1837. These events are recorded in registers which are kept by the local superintendent registrar and you can order a copy certificate for a fee, if you provide certain information.

The superintendent registrar is responsible for ensuring that the records are maintained correctly and that the indices (not the registers) are available for inspection by the public. Having been created in 1837 they provide a continuous record, area by area, for every part of England and Wales.

A register office only has the records of births, marriages and deaths for its own area. For all other records you should seek advice from the General Register Office, the register office for the district in which the event took place, the local Record Office, your local library or neighbouring authorities:

• Gloucestershire
• Monmouthshire
• Powys
• Shropshire
• Worcestershire

We can carry out a search of our records for all cremations carried out in Hereford Crematorium since 1956. Cremation searches are free, however, there is a charge for a copy of the cremation certificate. Visit our burial and cremation searches page to find out more.

Herefordshire Archive and Record Centre

Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre holds records of local significance and also national indexes and records. We hold archives for the county of Herefordshire, the city of Hereford, the diocese of Hereford, as well as other local bodies and individuals.

We also offer free access to the Ancestry website for online searching of national general register office indexes and other records.

We have an online index to our wills and archival collections which is part of an ongoing project. Access the indexes from our archive collections page.The local indexes compiled by the Herefordshire Family History Society can also be viewed here.

If you have any further questions please email us at archives@herefordshire.gov.uk

Herefordshire Family History Society

You may also find it useful to join the Herefordshire Family History Society to help with your research.

Planning searches

We offer two options for searching for the planning history for a site - you can either order the documents and review yourself, or pay us to search the records for you. You can find more information on our planning searches page.