Suffolk/Transcriptions

East Bergholt burials

Posted on by Helen Barrell

Over 1,300 burials for East Bergholt in Suffolk, from 1682 to 1727.

And that’s the last of my East Bergholt transcriptions. Look out for more transcriptions from Birch in Essex, plus many more Suffolk transcriptions!

The image above shows all that’s left of the tomb of Anna Parker of East Bergholt, who died in 1656. She was the wife of Henry Parker and the daughter of William Cardinall and Mary Derehaugh. The camel on the right was the Cardinall’s crest. The bear is presumbly that of the Parker’s. You can just about see the remains of her painted coat of arms in the middle, with a huge number of quarterings, but sadly they’re barely visible now.

Suffolk/Transcriptions

East Bergholt burials

Posted on by Helen Barrell

More East Bergholt burials online – from 1656 to 1682. It was a busy place in the seventeenth century, with 1,200 burials in less than three decades!

The image shows the memorial brass for Robert Alefounder in St Mary’s church, East Bergholt, who died in 1639. Unfortunately, he passed away before the surviving records for the parish began, but it’s a brilliant image showing how a wealthy man of the period would’ve dressed.

Documents/History/Sources

The government’s consultation on the storage and retention of wills: my response

Posted on by Helen Barrell

I use wills all the time for my family history research, and for local history research too. They might come from county archives, or from the National Archives’ Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills, they might come from the National Library of Scotland. And sometimes, they might be from the centrally-managed collection of wills for England and Wales, which have been accumulating steadily since 1858 to the present day.

The government’s plan, in order to save money, is to digitise all of the wills and ditch the originals, apart from wills of famous people, and with a rolling wall to avoid binning anything that’s too recent and could cause upset (“sentimental reasons”), as they put it, or because the original needs to be referred to in case of a dispute. It’s a bit confusing because recent wills are originals – you get a scan of a document that’s been typed or printed, but older wills are clearly from a register of wills and I assume the originals of those are long gone. It’s unclear whether they mean to bin the registers of historical wills too.

There are several problems with the proposal.

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