Family History
Guidance for people searching for family records at St Barts
If you want a copy of a baptism or marriage certificate for a ceremony that took place at St Bartholomew’s Church, these can be provided on request to the vicar. Fees are laid down by the Church Commissioners and are currently £9.00 for a baptism certificate and £7.00 for a marriage certificate. If a search of the registers is needed, the fee is £19.00 in each case.
However, we do not hold the registers here for all the weddings or baptisms that have taken place. We have baptism records from April 1951 onwards and marriage registers from 1924 onwards. All our records from 1832 up to that date are kept at the Lewisham Local Studies Centre, whose contact details are:
| Address | Lewisham Library, 199-201 Lewisham High Street, London SE13 6LG |
|---|---|
| Tel | 020 8297 0682. |
| local.studies@lewisham.gov.uk. |
Lewisham Local Studies Centre also has our burial records from 1832 to 1923. The churchyard was closed for new burials in 1858. In the 1980s a Garden of Remembrance was created for the interment of ashes of parishioners. The records of these are kept at St Bartholomew’s.
If you want to find out about your ancestors who may have lived here, and be either buried in the churchyard or commemorated by a memorial, a large and fascinating archive exists at Kent Archaeology. It also provides information about some of the leading figures of Sydenham in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This contains over 500 entries for St Bartholomew’s, with a mass of detail about the family, friends and contacts of the people concerned. To access it, go to: www.kentarchaeology.org.uk; click on “research Section” click on “MI’s list” and find Sydenham St Bartholomew listed alphabetically.