RootsChat.Com

Good Morning
For foreigners up North like myself  Sid Abbey is between Sidmouth and Salcombe.
James Clarke was born 1788 and buried at Salcombe  15.4.1845

Ciderdrinker

Just a small clarification. Salcombe is the well-known port in the South Hams area and is some sixty km as the crow flies from Sidmouth.
Salcombe Regis is a small village slightly to the East of Sidmouth.
Sid Abbey is on the outskirts of Sidmouth on the way to Sidford and can be found on Google maps.

I suspect the mention of race is because the details are taken from an LDS site, not from the original register. Whilst the British recorders had no interest in race it was of much more importance to family historians in the USA.

I have a feeling I've asked this before, maybe several years ago, without success but things change so it is worth asking again.
Are any of the actual Westmorland PRs available to view on line ? The other counties I have been researching in have all had their PRs and/or BTs online either with Ancestry or Family Search, but not Westmorland.  A few oddments do appear on FindMyPast but not a large selection.
Family Search do have these records, which have been made searchable in a transcript form but attempts to view the originals result in a message : "Access the site at a FamilySearch center.
Access the site at a FamilySearch affiliate library." 

If the originals are not available is there some particular reason why not (diocesan objection, perhaps ? ) or is it just a matter of waiting for somebody to process them ?

It "might" be wrong but it is not very common as these are official documents which people usually take care to try to get right. On the other hand far too many on-line trees are just quick compilations by people who have little understanding of even the most basic checks and have cobbled together various strands of information without looking for supporting evidence. They remind me of the Victorian period "family historians" who created a supposed history by taking a few names and then doing a quick trawl through the local parish records for similar names without actually checking whether they were related.
A quick check of twenty on-line trees containing one of my G-grandfathers and his descendants , all of whom I have well documented, shows sixteen of them contain errors : Wrong marriage, wrong children, wrong birthplace, children to wrong parents, wrong death  etc.  Mostly things that are easily checked by reference to PRs and Civil Registration.
What is particularly galling is that so many do not post their sources so it is not possible to check the validity of their entries.

(And a question for Erato here : what is the point of posting a tree on-line if it is inaccurate and without sources ?)

Having said that, I have found that trees posted by serious investigators can be of great help in tracing ancestors by pointing in new directions. I have recently gone back another three generations on one line after a tip from an on-line tree that had picked up a misspelling in the formal records that I had missed.

Thank you all for your replies.

Unfortunately, and I may not have made myself clear, I already have most of the information you have offered. What I am trying to establish is : Is the Ann Coote, nee Hewen, given as the mother of the six children (I had missed Jane !) born between 1798 and 1810  in Northwold the same person as the Jane Hewen who married a Joseph Coote in Methwold in 1798 ?
Apart from the mark on the Methwold marriage record which lli1133 has noted and which could read “ann” but might also be Jane's “Mark”, there seems to be no evidence that these are the same person. If “Ann” was a family or pet name for Jane it seems odd that the Vicar used the name in the Baptismal records but not at the time of her burial in 1843, nor does it show on her gravestone.

I feel it would be wrong to just assume that Jane and Ann are the same person without some sort of confirming evidence.  Granted that the dates seem to fit but, as I said in my first post, there were several Joseph Coote around Norfolk/Suffolk at the time so a second pair is possible.

Ah ! The joys of Family History !

Maec