The D'Arcy Archive
RG 4 · 36 registers · catalogued 13 September 2026

The Bristol chapels

The one open question in this archive's English line is where Hannah Saniger was born. The likeliest answer is a Bristol chapel. Here is every Bristol chapel register the state holds, and exactly which ones could contain her.

When the Registrar General took in the nonconformist registers in 1837 they were bound, numbered and shelved as RG 4. They are the registers of people who did not christen their children in the parish church — Baptists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Moravians, Welsh Calvinistic Methodists — and they are exactly where a Bristol working family of the 1810s is most likely to be found.

This archive's errand list has said for weeks that there were five Bristol chapel registers to read. That was a guess, and it was wrong by a factor of seven. The catalogue holds 36.

Twelve of them can contain a birth between 1805 and 1815 — the window for Hannah Saniger. The other twenty-four cannot, and can now be struck off without opening them. That is the point of doing this before travelling anywhere.
Every Bristol register in RG 4

36 volumes, 15 chapels

PieceCoversChapelDenominationContents
RG 4/388 1714–1837 Bridge Street Chapel Congregational Baptisms
RG 4/3765 1679–1746 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/3766 1726–1778 Broad Mead Baptist Births
RG 4/2871 1746–1791 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/1829 1756–1827 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/2697 1787–1817 Broad Mead Baptist Births
RG 4/1826 1789–1803 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/1827 1804–1836 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/1358 1813–1837 Broad Mead Baptist Births
RG 4/2923 1828–1834 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/1828 1836–1837 Broad Mead Baptist Burials
RG 4/1544 1808–1837 Broadmead Welsh Chapel Calvinistic Methodist Births and Baptisms
RG 4/2686 1834–1837 Brunswick Chapel in Brunswick Square Independent Births and Baptisms
RG 4/2499 1837–1856 Brunswick Chapel in Brunswick Square Independent Burials
RG 4/2498 1838–1856 Brunswick Chapel in Brunswick Square Independent Baptisms
RG 4/1792 1784–1816 Castle Green Meeting Independent Births and Baptisms
RG 4/1359 1816–1837 Castle Green Meeting Independent Births and Baptisms
RG 4/913 1793–1819 Ebenezer Chapel in King Street Wesleyan Births and Baptisms
RG 4/3257 1817–1837 Ebenezer Chapel in King Street Wesleyan Births and Baptisms
RG 4/2698 1827–1855 King Street Baptist Burials
RG 4/3254 1813–1837 Langton Street Chapel, formerly Guinea Street Chapel Wesleyan Births and Baptisms
RG 4/2687 1828–1837 Langton Street Chapel, formerly Guinea Street Chapel Wesleyan Burials
RG 4/1830 1718–1840 Lewins Mead Chapel Presbyterian Baptisms
RG 4/2497 1759–1786 Lewins Mead Chapel Presbyterian Baptisms
RG 4/3507 1768–1820 Lewins Mead Chapel Presbyterian Burials
RG 4/3323 1820–1837 Lewins Mead Chapel Presbyterian Burials
RG 4/1831 1822–1837 Newfoundland Street and Great George Street Independent Births and Baptisms
RG 4/1417 1820–1837 Somerset Countess of Huntingdon Births and Baptisms (1820-1837); Bristol, Somerset, Denomination: Countess of Huntingdon: Burials (1830-1837)
RG 4/3255 1817–1837 St Philips Chapel Wesleyan Births and Baptisms
RG 4/3256 1818–1837 St Philips Chapel Wesleyan Burials
RG 4/1360 1775–1837 Tabernacle in Penn Street Calvinistic Methodist Births and Baptisms
RG 4/2688 1775–1812 Tabernacle in Penn Street Calvinistic Methodist Births and Baptisms
RG 4/1361 1755–1837 Upper Maudlin Street Moravian Births, Baptisms and Burials
RG 4/4617 1687–1701 formerly the Mayor's Chapel St Mark the Gaunt Foreign Churches Baptisms, Marriages and Burials
RG 4/4618 1701–1715 formerly the Mayor's Chapel St Mark the Gaunt Foreign Churches Baptisms, Marriages and Burials
RG 4/4619 1715–1807 formerly the Mayor's Chapel St Mark the Gaunt Foreign Churches Baptisms, Marriages and Burials

Shaded rows are births or baptisms whose dates cover 1805–1815. catalogue, verbatim

And the reason the chapels matter this much

Bristol is not in FreeREG

Before recommending the chapel registers it is worth establishing what the parish registers can do, and the answer turns out to be almost nothing. William and Mary SMITH, across Gloucestershire, for the twenty-one years 1800–1820.

Entries returned289
Parishes they come from75
Of those, inside Bristol Stapleton — 1 entry

Two hundred and eighty-nine entries, seventy-five parishes, and ONE of them inside Bristol — Stapleton, on the edge of the city, with a single entry. Not one Bristol city parish appears at all. The largest parishes in the result are Dursley (19), Tewkesbury (17), Wotton-under-Edge (17), Ebrington (16), Gloucester (16) — the Vale and the Cotswolds, thoroughly done. The city is missing.

Not present at any size: St Paul · St Philip and Jacob · St James · St Augustine the Less · St Mary Redcliffe · Temple · St Stephen · St Werburgh · St Nicholas · Clifton · Bedminster · Barton Regis.

FreeREG has essentially no Bristol for 1800–1820. Every search this archive has run for a Bristol baptism has been searching a city that is not in the index, and the emptiness it kept returning was the index's, not the family's. coverage established by control test

This is the same mistake as Portsea, found on the same day and in the opposite direction: there, a two-year transcript was read as a searched parish; here, an untranscribed city was read as an empty one. Both come from using an index without measuring it. And it is why Chew Magna has to be read on film →
One detail worth keeping

Bristol is filed under Somerset

Nearly every one of these registers is catalogued "Bristol, … , Somerset". Only Bridge Street Chapel is filed under Gloucester. The city straddles the Avon and therefore the county line, and clerks have been choosing sides ever since.

This matters here more than it looks. The 1841 census at Drivers Fields records Hannah as not born in Gloucestershire — a single tick in a column. If she was born south of the Avon in what everyone including her called Bristol, that tick is correct, and it has been read for years as though it pointed away from the city. It does not. It points across a river. Where the search has already been → an argument, not a finding

What to do with this

  1. The Anglican registers are not an alternative. Bristol's parish registers exist, and they are filmed — but they are not in the free index, so nothing here can be ruled out by searching it. Any Bristol search from a desk has to be the chapels or nothing. What has actually been read →
  2. Twelve volumes, named and numbered. They are digitised, and can be read without leaving the house. This is now a specific task rather than an aspiration. On the queue →
  3. Broad Mead and Lewins Mead first. Broad Mead is the great Bristol Baptist congregation and its births run 1787–1817 in one volume (RG 4/2697); Lewins Mead's Presbyterian baptisms run 1718–1840 in another (RG 4/1830). Between them they cover the whole window twice over.
  4. And the honest caveat. Nothing yet suggests the Sanigers were nonconformist. This is where to look because it is where the Anglican registers are not, not because there is evidence pointing at a chapel. a hypothesis being tested