Was your ancestor married by a witchfinder?
Well… sort of…. During the Commonwealth, from the time of the 1653 Marriage Act to the Restoration in 1660, marriages weren’t performed by cle...
Tag: parish registers
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...
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...
Interesting finds in West Bergholt’s parish registers
One of the pleasures of transcribing parish registers are the intriguing marginalia that turn up in them sometimes. I’m yet to find a pre-1813 parchment r...
Lawshall & The Gunpowder Plot
Everyone knows about Guy Fawkes, the Catholic Yorkshire man 1)Some might claim, Somerset man, but that is Robert Parsons, who came from outside Bridgwater, alle...
Black History Month – some finds in Wivenhoe’s register
Growing up in Wivenhoe, I probably saw a greater mix of people from around the world than had I lived in a town of the same size that wasn’t anywhere near...
Parish registers in Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White”
*contains spoilers* If you’ve ever read The Woman in White, then you’ll know that all the mystery and obfuscation, the swapping of people drugged on...
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’...