Welcome to the catalogue of the Essex Record Office, where you can discover your Essex ancestors or the history of your home, village or town.
This site offers written descriptions of every item in the archive, but not the full text of the documents themselves. Some entries contain images of the item. If your search returns more entries than you require, try our advanced search. For help using this site, please see our user guides.
On Sunday 18 November, between 12 noon and 7 p.m. (GMT), essential maintenance will be carried out on the Council's financial systems. There may be a period when it will not be possible to buy new subscriptions to Essex Archives Online. We apologize for the inconvenience that this will cause. Existing subscriptions are not affected. [Message posted on 15 November, 12 noon.]
You can view high quality colour images of Essex parish registers and wills. Just register and buy a subscription.
This is the online catalogue for the Essex Record Office. Here you can find a description of every document we look after. You can also see how each item fits into the collection.
The Essex Record Office holds many thousands of documents, maps, photographs, sound recordings and videos. Most of these have not been digitised. To see these you will have to visit the Essex Record Office in person, or apply for a search, or ask for a copy of a document to be sent to you.
The Essex Record Office has an active digitisation programme, and some of the descriptions in Essex Archives Online include high quality digital images of the records themselves. Using these, you can do some of your family history research or other research without needing to see the originals. All of our images are free to view in the ERO Searchroom. Online, you can view images of a few records for free, but for most digitised records – such as parish registers, wills and electoral registers – you need to register and buy a subscription.