RootsChat.Com

Yes - anyone using this needs to be aware that some unfortunate things happened en route to the web-site.

If I look for my Bruce family, there are no Bruce burials in the Howff, it claims, before about 1858. Not true at all. I was given to understand that some entries (scope unknown) were indexed but the indexes lost. The Howff books were properly reindexed for - I think - ScotlandsPeople.

Nevertheless, the search facility on these files - because it's just a text file, you can search every word - can be very useful.

Chester Record Office catalogue has

Reference    P 42
Title    Bosley St. Mary Parish
Date    18th century-21st century
Description    Registers: Baptisms 1728-2004, Burials 1728-2004. Records other than registers 1728-1977.

In other words there are no parish registers (PRs) surviving from earlier than 1728 (well, unless they are somewhere where they wouldn't normally be). I would suggest that it might be worth looking at Prestbury registers because Bosley started as a chapel in that parish, so early Bosley records should be in the Prestbury registers up until Bosley started its own registers. Whenever that was.

It looks like what FS has on Item 3 of film 1655397 (as I suspect you might know) are the Bishops' Transcripts which have that gap from 1700-1718. BTs are a copy of course(?) - so I wonder what they are a copy of??? Either of lost registers or of Bosley entries in the Prestbury PRs?

Looks like the Prestbury PRs are your best and possibly only hope.

Adrian

... its not possible to buy them all. I suspect that is the case for most researchers.
My time is free though and, even if it takes a long while to find an alternate source for the info, for me its worthwhile. ...

That's perfectly sensible. I certainly don't buy all the certificates for BMDs in my tree - though I buy more for Scotland because they're so much cheaper. In England & Wales, I usually only buy certificates for my (direct) ancestors - basically because I got paranoid about what a cousin had done - she had made the mistake of believing a census about our mutual great-grandfather. She therefore had him, with his supposed parents, in Preston when he actually came from Penwortham, a village across the river from Preston. By good fortune - not deliberately at that time - I'd got all his censuses, the earlier ones of which gave the correct birthplace. After that, I made sure I got everything that was feasible. (And everyone's definition of feasibility will differ).

The only thing that I'd encourage people to think about is the idea that their time is free. It isn't. We may pay for it in different ways but it's time spent that we'll never get back again, time that we can't spend on something else. It can even lead, indirectly, into cash - far better for me to spend one full day at Chester Record Office than two half days - that's one lunch rather than two! And it might be that spending cash on a certificate enables me to short circuit the process and do one full day now rather than a half-day now and another in the future. (Depending on what I pay for lunch and transport it might even be cheaper!)

Certainly, in this case, first having a look for any non-conformist marriages online would make excellent sense - that's why I mentioned the possibility. The only thing then is how long do you spend looking? As suggested, LancsOPC is definitely a place to look (you may have done so already) and so are FindMyPast (for Cheshire records) and Ancestry (for Lancashire records).

Thanks for that. So far as I can see:
Registers of Burials 1772-1854 Indexed by FDCA
This will be the original registers whose indexes we see on the FDCA site and on ScotlandsPeople. (I'm not getting at the indexers but it's known that a stack of real or electronic cards was lost during the FDCA indexing process - fortunately the gap is filled in by the ScotlandsPeople data.)

Monumental Inscriptions* C.1984 Dundee City Archives*
The * indicates that this is Volume 4 of the Pre-1855 MIs published by the Scottish Genealogy Society.

Register & Plan of Tombstones 1832 Dundee City Archives
This is the only thing that might help me, though I suspect it's not "The Book of the Howff" (one of them) both because it doesn't use that simple title and because Volume 4 of the Pre-1855 MIs says that DCA has a manuscript Register & Index but that it excludes the MIs. Still, I didn't know about this beforehand so it might help me.

I've mailed FDCA to see if they recognise the image - if they don't, I might try Dundee Central Library to see what they hold in terms of things called "Book(s) of the Howff" in their Local Studies - if they do have one or more, then it looks like a visit to Dundee is needed to check the books.