More Long Melford marriages!

Nearly 280 marriages from Long Melford in Suffolk, from 1754 to 1771, including witnesses’ names, are now available.

This is the last of my transcriptions for Long Melford, which run all the way from 1559 to 1771. For people who love numbers, here we go:

  • Over 200 years of transcriptions.
  • Nearly 11,000 baptisms
  • Over 8,000 burials
  • Over 2,000 marriages
  • A grand total of over 21,000 records!

It’s quite a relief to move onto another parish after all that! So look out for Capel St Mary transcriptions coming your way soon.

A foundling, found

I’m currently transcribing Capel St Mary and a baptism on 3 November 1731 for a baby named Mary Capel:

Mary Capel, an infant who was found under the Overseers window at about two a clock in the morning & whose parents are unknown.

Then another note, in the same handwriting, follows:

This infant was afterward found out to be the Daughter of Elizabeth wife of Aaron Dunstal of Brightlandsea in Essex.

This raises so many questions. Why did the mother abandon her baby, and why in Capel St Mary, which is nearly 20 miles away from Brightlingsea? The wording could suggest that Mary wasn’t Aaron’s daughter, which would explain why she was abandoned. The couple had four children baptised in Brightlingsea between 1721 and 1729, then Aaron was died in 1743. Or could Elizabeth have been struggling with post-natal depression, and had abandoned her baby miles from home while her mind was fogged?

And who worked out that Elizabeth Dunstall was her mother? Did Elizabeth have second thoughts and return to Capel to claim her baby? Or had someone given her a lift on their cart, and after hearing about a baby being left in Capel, later realised they’d dropped Elizabeth off with her child, where she was planning to leave her newborn?

Elizabeth is in my family tree, strangely enough, but only as a very distant relative by marriage. I wonder if she had any family in Capel St Mary? She must’ve known the village in order to have left the baby “under the Overseers window” – the Overseer of the Poor would know what to do in order to care for an abandoned child. A sad story all round, really, but an insight into life in England two hundred years ago.

(Strictly speaking, Capel is Capel St Mary, to differentiate it from Capel St Andrew near Woodbridge. But when I was growing up just outside Colchester, it was referred to as Capel, and I was surprised when I realised there were actually two Capels!).

More Long Melford burials

The last of my Long Melford burials are now online! There’s nearly 1,200 from 1741-1765.

There’s not many notes in this set of records, but the vicar decided to record the following after a funeral in 1765:

Mrs. Mary Armstrong, a stranger from the kingdom of Ireland who desired to be buried at 5 in the morning what clothes she had on when she died was never taken from her body & was buried therein.

Marriages 1754-1771 coming soon, then it’s off to a new parish!

Ancestry release Suffolk parish registers on Friday 8th August

We’ve all been waiting for digitised images of Suffolk’s massive collection of parish registers (and hopefully Bishop’s Transcripts too) for a very long time.

The wait is nearly over – they will be released on Ancestry, with an index, on Friday 8th August.

It is very exciting, but I’ve written before about my issues with how error-strewn indexing can be on Ancestry. Since I wrote that, I found an entire page of baptisms on there where the index said all the children were bastards. The only reason I can think for this mistake is because the indexer misread “baptised” as “bastard”. *sigh*

Anyway, here’s a nice photo of a Suffolk church….

More Long Melford marriages

Marriages from 1701 to 1753 are now online!

I transcribed marriages from 1717-1753 over a decade ago, so I’ve revised and updated them, as well as added marriages from 1701-1716. There’s nearly 600 for you to look through, and they include several people from Essex, so maybe you’ll knock down some pesky brickwalls!

Detail from "The Comforts of Matrimony". Copyright Trustees of the British Museum

Image: “The Comforts of Matrimony, a good toast” by Thomas Rowlandson, 1809. © Trustees of the British Museum.