Weaverham Parish Registers (1700 to 1780) Surname Audley

[audbr]

Hi, Can any body help.
I have been reviewing the information I have for Entries in the Weaverham Parish Registers for people with the Audley Surname. The baptisms marriages and burials are listed below in date order:

1706-07                     Assumed Birth of Ralph Audley based on age at burial (see below)
2nd December 1714   Death of Thomas Audley of Acton
3rd January 1737       Marriage Bride Catherine Garnerof Acton Groom Ralph Audley of Acton
9th May 1742              Baptism Joseph Audley Father Ralph Audley of Acton
12th November 1758   Burial Joseph Audley of Acton.
11th December 1764   Burial Eleanor (from Bishops Transcript); Ellnor (from Parish Register)  wife of Ralph Audley of Acton (Parish Register); of Weaverham (Bishop's Transcript)
12th December 1780    Burial Ralph Audley aged 73

From the above I am assuming that: Thomas Audley (buried 1714) was the Father of Ralph Audley (born 1706-07) and that this Ralph Audley married first to Catherine Garner (married 1737). The same Ralph Audley married second to Eleanor or Ellnor (surname and date of marriage unknown). Ralph's second wife died in 1764.  Ralph himself died in 1780 aged 73. This Ralph also had a son who was born in 1742 and died in 1758. Most of the above records refer to Acton.

Can any body please help me find:

The place and date of the burial of Ralph's first wife born Catherine Garner

The place and date of Ralph's second marriage to someone called Eleanor or Ellnor

The place and date of Ralph's baptism (around 1706-07). I have been looking at a well known pay to view/ subscription website. If I search for the baptism of a Ralph (without entering a surname) the search results give me a Ralph (with no surname listed) who was baptised at Weaverham on 5th February 1707 with no parent listed. (according to the transcription.)  When I look at the image I cannot find the entry. I am not even sure it is the correct image that has been displayed.  The transcription I refer to is of the Bishop's Transcript. For some reason I do not understand I do not get a search result from the Parish Register. Does any body have access to the Bishop's Transcripts or Parish Registers of Weaverham to help me resolve the baptism that took place at Weaverham on 5th February 1707?

For completeness I have references to a number of other people called Ralph Audley mainly in Nantwich so I am assuming that the Ralph Audley at Weaverham must somehow be related to them.

Many thanks in anticipation of your help
Regards
Brian Audley

[rolnora]

Hi Brian,
Have you searched the CPrd database. I'm not sure it will tell you anything that you don't already know but it could be worth a try.

http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~cprdb/

Apologies if you have already tried it 

[audbr]

Hi rolnora,
Yes I have searched the CPrd database without success.
The problem I have with the CPrd database is that one has to search for a surname and there appears to be no way to search with wild cards as Audley is frequently miss transcribed as Andley.

Again for marriages I cannot search for a marriage between a Ralph and an Eleanor to try and cover for mis-spelt surnames.

So I am afraid the CPrd database does not help me, if someone knows how to do other types of search on the CPrd database website then they may be more successful than me.
Regards
Brian

[AdrianB38]

OK - not sure why the index isn't there on the PR, but here goes:

1. I am assuming you are talking about FindMypast - I shall no doubt get shouted at for this, but please tell us the proper name of the site you are looking at - it does not constitute advertising.

2. The BT page is seriously poor on FindMyPast. It looks like a photocopy, rather than a camera copy. In a case like this, it is best to find another (legible) name on the page and search the PRs for that - potentially turning pages. (Obviously, the tactic applies the other way round if it's the PR that's illegible). I tried to look for a baptism of a Maria (just visible above) baptised 1707 exactly, searching the Cheshire PRs with an optional keyword of Weaverham (thanks to a combination of FamilySearch's indexing and FindMyPast's less than optimal software, using the vague search-key "keyword" is often better than trying to define a place.)

3. The entry I found was Maria Bassnet on 5 Feb 1707.
If you look at the image, there are 4 children baptised that day - the first is February die quinto (February 5th day), the rest are codem die (on the same day)

4. The 4th entry is Radulphus filius illegitimus peregrini codem die. Google translate has this as "Ralph illegitimate child of foreigners on the same day". So I doubt he's the Audley you're looking for. Or at least, there's no evidence that he is.

[AdrianB38]

Like you, I am drawing a blank looking for the burial of Catherine Audley or the marriage to "Eleanor". (I used a wild-card search on FindMyPast of A*dl*y - as you say, there are multiple versions.)

As far as the 2nd marriage goes, I even took off any "Cheshire" criteria, which should have given me a search on Shropshire (a lot of) and Staffordshire (a lot of) - nothing. I tried Ancestry, who have a lot of Lancashire and (all of?) Manchester - still nothing for the marriage.

I'm sure you've spent a lot longer than I just did - so in the absence of both the burial and the 2nd marriage, I seriously wonder if there's an error somewhere in the originals and either "Eleanor" should be Catherine or vice versa. The trouble is that there seems to be so little data outside Nantwich (but still inside Cheshire) that I can't see any way of proving that idea.

And there seems nothing in the wills that might help, either. (Incidentally, with seeing the references to Nantwich, I kept wondering why Weaverham had so many references to Acton, thinking of the one outside Nantwich - of course, this is the "other" Acton!)

[audbr]

Thanks AdrianB38 for your reply, please accept my apology for not replying earlier. I have been out this morning with my 3 year old grandson, playing hide and seek in the woods.

You are correct I was talking about find my past. I have decided to use that website as I understand that it has the best coverage of Cheshire Parishes  unless of course somebody tells me differently.

I started off by finding parish records I knew about and found an Audley in Shotwick transcribed as Ridley and as there are many miss spellings of the Audley surname the wildcard search that includes them all is probably *ley!!

 Having just had a play on the FindMyPast website I have realised that if I put Weaverham in the Keword search box it limits the search results to Parish Registers and Bishop Transcripts from Weaverham.

To try and tie up all the loose records with the surname Audley I guess I am going to have to search on a parish by parish basis with a search name of *ley and then look at the images of any possible miss spellings of the Audley Surname.

Many thanks for your help I will follow up your ideas
Regards
Brian

[AdrianB38]

... as there are many miss spellings of the Audley surname the wildcard search that includes them all is probably *ley!!
...

Oh rude words! Actually, as an aside, I have a similar problem with "Pickstock". You'd think as a rare and distinctive name, it'd be easy to track. Nope. As a rare name, no-one has any idea of a standard spelling. I think the only wild-card that works would be P*. But I think I might have seen a Bickstock once! (NB - I am joking about P* - I think most sites would reject P*!)

Yes, FindMyPast is the most extensive coverage of Cheshire. There are about 4, 5, 6? parishes pre1900 that aren't covered and I think one of those is in Ancestry's Manchester collection because it went into the Manchester Diocese. Another is Astbury and its PRs but the Astbury BTs are on FindMyPast. Not sure about the others. FamilySearch can be useful - they produced the indexes for Chester Record Office that were passed on to FindMyPast. The FindMyPast search can be more powerful than FindMyPast's, particularly if you want to search across multiple collections. But the images are only on FindMyPast.

[audbr]

Hi AdrianB38,
As well as the variation of spelling of surnames I am startig to wonder for the period 1700 to 1800:

What percentage of our ancestors were baptised?
What percentage of our ancestors who lived as man and wife and had children actually got married? and
What percentage of our ancestors who died were buried in a graveyard or cemetery?

If the answer is significantly less than 100% it is no wonder family historians struggle in that period.

Regards
Brian

[AdrianB38]

All good questions, Brian. But I think that the answers are closer to 100% than many people imagine. Though difficult to prove.

The marriage % is perhaps subject to the most "little knowledge is a dangerous thing" statements. People throw around statements like "People didn't get married until the woman was proved to be fertile" (i.e. she was pregnant). Rebecca Probert's book "Marriage Law for Genealogists" does some analysis and finds no meaningful evidence of this in the area and era she looked at.

The problem is that we are always moulded by the examples we find in our own families - hence if we get missing baptisms, we assume that it's widespread. For what it's worth, I've been intrigued by the high percentage of children who are baptised. In one family, the children weren't - then, all of a sudden, nearly the whole family got baptised in one session - I suspect that was because their last living parent had died, the children went into the custody of other relatives who found out that they hadn't been baptised and remedied the omission swiftly. Plenty of cases where I can't find baptisms, of course - one family I'm looking at seems to be totally lacking baptisms - then I found that one marriage was Roman Catholic, so I suspect there's the answer in that case.

I reckon that 99.9% of people were buried in graveyards - where else?

What's just as likely to account for missing people, I suggest, are

• People who move - I think the population was much more mobile than we imagine;
• Records that are not kept or lost later - Bunbury PRs are severely deficient in the early 1700s according to some sources, e.g.;
• Errors in the originals - one of my ancestors in Acton (the one near Nantwich) was definitely recorded in error;
• "Lies" in the originals - my possibly Catholic family includes a will that is a masterpiece of misinformation;

Clearly genuine omissions are in there somewhere and we can speculate as long as we like (because it's good fun!) but my gut feeling is that they don't explain the majority of issues. Probably omitted baptisms are a major issue just as significant as the ones above; omitted marriages maybe. I don't think omitted burials are significant.

Or that's my Sunday morning speculation!