Records for Family History

We offer expert advice to beginners and to those who are more advanced, whether your ancestors lived in Bath or elsewhere.

Paid research

Our paid research service is available if you would like help with your family history. Click here for further details.

While the Record Office is closed to the public during the Coronavirus pandemic we are still able to access websites such as Ancestry, Find My Past and British Newspaper Archive and conduct research on your behalf.

Next steps

If you have traced your family as far back as you can online, and found that they came from Bath or the surrounding area, we may be able to help you with more advanced sources.  Two of the most useful sources are church registers and burial indexes, but there are a great many other sources which you can use. Depending on the particular family you are researching street directories, wills, and records of the law courts and poor relief can all provide valuable information.  Details of these and other useful sources, with lists of what we hold, can be found in the Family History leaflet and the Records of Official Bodies leaflet.

Or you can try a short cut. Information has been extracted from some of these more advanced sources, and has been put on our Bath Ancestors database. Search the database to see if you can find any of your ancestors.

You may be interested in the house your family once lived in, or where they worked. We have many resources suitable for building history research which have been detailed on the Building History page and leaflet.