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.
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.
Some of the descriptions show high quality digital images of the records, so you can do some of your family history research or other research online. You can view images of some records for free. But for others – such as parish registers and wills – you need to subscribe.
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 or ask for a copy of a document to be sent to you.
We offer images of wills and parish registers from Essex to subscribers only. To see images of these records, you will need to both register and buy a subscription.