Wattisham St Nicholas

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Notes

  • There is a saga relating to the early registers of Wattisham. The earliest register, covering the years before 1680, was almost entirely destroyed, apart from one page of baptisms and marriages (1582-1612) which was used as the covers for the 1680-1736 register. See Charles Partridge’s notes, and my best attempt at transcriptions from these very faded and damaged entries.
  • See “”A very extraordinary and singular case” at Wattisham, 1762″, when an entire family was ravaged by an unknown disease.
  • No entries at all for 1755, apart from one baptism and one burial found in the Bishop’s Transcripts.
  • No baptisms 1812.
  • No burials in main register 1784-1791, but all years found in Bishop’s Transcripts (although no one was buried in 1791). None 1809-1810.
  • Baptisms 1784-1804 and burials 1792-1797 are recorded on separate sheets, with a note saying they’re entries which have been taxed, while “paupers taking relief from the Hundred House” are recorded in the “old register”. Baptisms and burials for those periods have been checked against the Bishop’s Transcripts. They all match, apart from two burials, one in 1792, and another in 1794, which only appear in the BT’s.
  • Marriages end 1743, and don’t resume until Wattisham gets its first printed register in 1783. I have no idea if marriages took place there in that 40 year gap and were lost or not recorded, or if no one was married there at all during that time. However, Suffolk Archives hold seven licences for that period for marriages which were to have taken place “at Wattisham”. One or two couples could’ve changed their minds and married elsewhere at the last minute, but I can’t believe that seven couples would’ve done so! Suffolk FHS’s Suffolk Marriages on Findmypast include some marriages from this period, so some – but I don’t think all – have survived somewhere in, I would imagine, BTs. It may not be unconnected that John Hall, Wattisham’s parish clerk for 49 years, died in April 1783. It’s possible that the printed register starting in 1754 was in his possession when he died, and wasn’t returned to the church.

Baptisms

Burials

Marriages

1580-1610 and 1680-1744

1745-1782

  • Lost, apart from a handful of marriage licences and possibly Bishop’s Transcripts. See note above.

1783-1812