(a) Absence of some early registers, others with gaps, damaged or indecipherable;
(b) Civil War, 1642-8, and the "Commonwealth period"; civil registration, superseding church registers, officially introduced 1653 and continued to 1660, in some areas appears to have operated from 1645. A (for those times) very substantial fee of one shilling per entry was payable, and this was no doubt a disincentive; in most cases the alternative records no longer exist;
(c) Between 1698 and 1703 tax was charged on registration of marriages;
(d) From 1783 to 1794 a duty of three pence (a not inconsiderable charge for some) was payable for each parish register entry of baptism, marriage or burial;
(e) Ages rarely shown in records of burials before 1812, and marriages before 1837 (and in some cases thereafter), creating difficulties where contemporaries had the same Christian name(s);
(f) St. Catherine's House indexes show age at death from 1866, end mother's maiden name for births and spouse’s surname for marriages from 191t; no such information is available for earlier entries; locations are registration districts (RD) which can comprise quite large areas; where precise details are desirable but not available from other sources the alternative is to purchase individual certificates, a course which has had to be limited for financial reasons. Any special difficulties arising in these and other cases are detailed in notes on the individuals concerned. Post-1836 births, marriages and deaths which occurred outside the "home territories" of Somerset, Bristol and Dorset, and a few within those areas, have been followed-up, where desirable and practicable, with members of the family in current telephone directories; sadly some of those approached have not responded, and the information they might have been able to provide is lacking.