A. Parish Finder is a tool for genealogists (family historians). It enables the user to interrogate a database of UK parishes , each tagged with a geospatial reference (i.e. an X and Y co-ordinate).

Parish Finder does things like find the distance between two parishes, and the parishes surrounding a given location. This second feature is great when one of your ancestors decided to get married in a parish a few miles away and didn't leave a record of where to look!

A. The default unit of measurement is kilometres. However, all searches allow you to specify the units you would like to use.

A. Not at present. We have been exploring options for postcode searching, but while the technical aspects are simple, the cost of a commercial postcode data set is a significant problem. There are a number of open source / free to use postcode data sets emerging at the moment, and we are looking at them with interest.

A. The site has been tested against Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. There is no obvious reason why it shouldn't work with earlier browsers (unless you are using something WAY, WAY old that doesn't support CSS). If you are having problems I suggest you upgrade your browser to one of those listed.

A. The people who make the Parish Locator program have kindly made their data available for use in other applications. They spend a lot of time correcting and updating the data, something that we are unable to do. This way, you should have more accurate data, and more coverage. Later on in the year we hope to have our own dataset, with wider parish coverage, and new site features.