Researching your roots

Records held at St Mary's

The registers currently kept at the church are limited. We hold:

• Baptisms from 1980 onwards
• Burials of ashes in the churchyard

For all earlier records — baptisms, marriages and burials — the registers have been deposited with Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS), where they are safely preserved and available to researchers.

A note on the old registers

St Mary's registers date back as far as 1553. Before 1754, baptisms, marriages and burials were often recorded together in a single register. From 1754, marriages were recorded separately, and from 1813 there were three distinct registers, one for each type of event.

The churchyard closed for burials in 1854; since then, only the burial of ashes has taken place at the church. After 1854, most burials in Ware took place at Ware Cemetery.

Graves & memorials

A plan of the churchyard, made in 1978, can be viewed at Hertfordshire Archives, along with a volume of gravestone transcriptions published by the Hertfordshire Family History Society. For burials at Ware Cemetery after 1854, please contact Ware Town Council.