Black History Month – Harwich and Boreham
It’s time for some parish register finds which show black people living in Essex hundreds of years ago. Last year, it was coincidentally in October that I...
Tag: Essex
Free Findmypast weekend Friday 18th to Monday 21st September
Hurrah for free stuff! If you’ve ever been curious as to what you might discover about your ancestors on Findmypast, then now’s your chance, with th...
Talk: Wivenhoe’s epidemics
Just a quick note – I’m giving a talk for the Wivenhoe History Group at the William Loveless Hall in Wivenhoe on Wednesday 8th July at 7.30pm. All a...
Caught by surprise in Little Bromley
As you might have noticed, notes in parish registers fascinate me. One I came across the other day seemed to pack quite a story into just one sentence. In the e...
Elizabeth Salter, Lady Cowdray or… some monkeys?
Whilst researching the Cardinall family, I got slightly sidetracked with Thomas Bowes’ family. In 1603, Charles Cardinall, widowed, married Bridget Bowes,...
Video: You say Austin, I say Alston – Essex and Suffolk accents
An interesting note from 1745 in West Bergholt‘s parish register shows us that the vicar got muddled up with some of his parishioners’ surnames. Und...
August 1666 – a bad time to be a sailor?
I’m currently transcribing the earliest register for Ramsey St. Michael in Essex. Although the very early register is lost, entries survive from 1645 onwa...
Wills – how they’re indexed and where to find them
What? All that in one blog post? Erm… no… however, there’s been a couple of jumps forward with regards to the availability of wills and will i...
Unfortunate ways to die in Beaumont-cum-Moze, 1576-1865
Dying is rather unfortunate anyway, but in Beaumont-cum-Moze, the causes of death are given far more often than they are in other burial registers that I’...
The Sunderland men who came to Essex
Photo by Cindy Lilley. I’ve nearly finished transcribing the baptisms and burials register for Wivenhoe St. Mary the Virgin, 1695-1751. It’s not unu...