Surrey History Centre is the county’s record office and local studies library, run by Surrey County Council. It collects and rescues archives and printed materials relating to Surrey’s past and present, so that they can tell the story of the county and its people to future generations.

The treasures in their care, whether manuscripts, photographs or digital records, illuminate the lives of the people of the county of Surrey across ten centuries. They document the changing face of Surrey and its physical, economic and social transformation. Their range also extends far beyond the county’s boundaries to slave plantations in Jamaica, famine-ravished Ireland, the mountains of the North West Frontier and the mud of the battlefields of Flanders.

Collections from Surrey History Centre on Ancestry sites include parish records. Before civil registration in England began in 1837, key events in a person’s life were typically recorded by the church rather than the state. Parish records are the best source of vital record information in England before the nineteenth century and remain an important source thereafter. This data collection contains images of Church of England baptism, marriage, and burial records in registers from Surrey. Parish records from the Diocese of Guildford (which includes a small part of Hampshire) and from a large part of the Diocese of Southwark (all except the Inner South London and Sutton Borough areas) are in the care of Surrey History Centre.

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