Arvil, You asked "/is there any hope of finding any information around 1600 or prior?"// / The answer is YES there is hope. The recording of baptisms, marriages, and burials in parish registers was ordered and began in England in 1538 -- a full two to three generations before your 1600 date. However, some parishes failed to comply with the order until Queen Elizabeth encouraged them, some parish registers have been lost, and others may be waiting to be transcribed. Some early 1538 registers do still exist. For more details on the timeline, please see http://www.british-genealogy.com/parish-registers/english-registers.html Dan On 3/25/2013 11:03 AM, arvhancock wrote: > Dan:Thanks for this information. My Hancock ancestors came to > Jamestown, VA in the 1600s. They descend from the John Hancock who was > an investor in The Virginia Company. Is there any hope of finding any > information around 1600 or prior? > Arvil > On Mar 25, 2013, at 10:33:58 AM, "Dan Hancock" <dan@hancockonline.net> > wrote: > > From: "Dan Hancock" <dan@hancockonline.net> > Subject: [HANCOCK] Researching U.K. Parish Registers > Date: March 25, 2013 10:33:58 AM PDT > To: hancock@rootsweb.com > Cc: "Karen Hancock" <karen@hancockonline.net> > > Folks, > > For those of us in North America who have Hancock ancestors from the > United Kingdom, once we have exhausted the BMD indexes back to 1837 > and the U.K. censuses back to 1841, to go back to earlier years we > must > use the U.K.'s old parish registers. This can appear to be a > barrier to > further research. Fortunately there are two convenient and free tools > that we can use to master the parish register system: > > 1. http://www.freereg.org.uk is a searchable database of parish > register data. As o f 10 March 2013 it contained 4,005,835 Marriages, > 11,782,431 Baptisms and 8,020,248 Burials. This includes some data not > available in the large subscription-based genealogy systems. > > 2. http://www.geograph.org.uk/mapbrowse.php is a nice mapping tool > that lets you drill down and find the location of parishes -- and see > photographs of key sites in and around each parish. > > Dan Hancock > > ------------------------------- > Join our DNA Project at: > http://www.familytreedna.com/group-join.aspx?Group=Hancock > > (Scroll down to place your order) > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > HANCOCK-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > >