Kirkoswald parish registers have a lot to tell family and social historians, even if your family have zero connection with this Cumbrian parish.<\/p>\n
Trawling through parish registers is a lot harder than putting a name into an online search box. But then baking a chocolate cake and eating it is far more satisfiying than taking a shop-bought one out of the cupboard!<\/p>\n
I have been known to (quietly!) punch the air and exclaim \u201cyes!!!!\u201d at a discovery made \u2018the hard way\u2019 in archives or other records offices.<\/p>\n
And while looking for members of my family, I have discovered other stories along the way. They may distract me from the main task, but they have often given me a greater understanding of how people lived in a particular time or area. And that gives me an idea of what life was like for my ancestors.<\/p>\n
The registers for Kirkoswald, in Cumberland (Cumbria) are a good example. You can actually find a typed transcript (created by local vicar the Rev John J Thornley, in 1901) on the Society of Genealogists website.<\/a><\/p>\n This is searchable by index boxes. But it\u2019s also possible to read every page. You get more out of it, can maybe spot things the indexer missed \u2013 and yes, I am happy that vicar typed it up! Scrolling through miles of microfilmed scans of original registers does take a lot longer. The scans aren\u2019t always grea, due to the condition of the original registers. And some clergymen\u2019s handwriting down the centuries is harder to read than others\u2019!<\/p>\n In 1737, on December 8, Henry Hutton stood in church, likely with his wife, for the joint funeral of their daughters Ann and Sarah.<\/p>\n Less than a fortnight later, they were back: for the funeral of their daughter Mary, \u2018an infant\u2019.<\/p>\n Assuming there weren\u2019t two Henry Huttons in Kirkoswald at that time (and that IS an assumption), we find he was in church in June 1723 for the happy occasion of his wedding, to Mary Richardson.<\/p>\n A baptism followed 11 months later: a son, called Thomas, was christened in May 1724.<\/p>\n However, there are no baptisms for any of the ill-fated daughters.<\/p>\n There are a bunch of possible explanations for this, and we can\u2019t know which is correct. One is that they were baptised in another parish (there is a Sarah christened in Addingham in 1733, to a Henry and Mary Hutton. Not a million miles from Kirkoswald). Another is that they used one of the non-conformist chapels for baptisms, but the Anglican church for funerals as it had a burial ground.<\/p>\nKirkoswald parish registers: poor Henry Hutton<\/h2>\n