Brettenham St Mary’s

In progress from 1584 to 1812. These transcriptions are also available on FreeREG.

Surnames on memorials in the churchyard and inside the church were published in The East Anglian (archive.org).

Notes

There are two beautiful, illustrated pages in the old register; the first acts as a title page, the second is a memorial to one of the rectors after he passed away.
Brettenham is a small, quiet village, but the entries are fairly constant so it seems there’s only a small chance of things having been missed. There are no obvious gaps.
There were a higher than usual number of burials in 1730: was there an epidemic?
Burials 1773 to 1774 are recorded as affidavits for burials in woollen. This means we don’t have the dates of the burials, but we do have the dates when whoever prepared the deceased for burial swore that they had only wrapped them in woollen cloth. The affidavits include the names of those who prepared the dead, which may highlight links between different people in the parish. Affidavits were usually sworn on the day of burial or soon after.
1780s baptisms and burials: some entries in the 1780s were written on separate sheets of paper that were later stitched in. They’ve been put in sideways, and there are five baptisms with uncertain years. I suspect they’re from 1785, but I don’t know for certain.
1780s marriages: apart from one marriage from 1787, all marriages and banns from 1784 to 1789 are entered in two separate paper registers which have been stitched into the main 1754-1812 register at the closest chronological point.