help with my geography please

[SingNic]

I stand corrected.

I'll still use modern maps, they are a good guide. You frequently find places which do not exist and then you know you have to look else where.

[Michael Dixon]

SingNic,

Please do not feel that you stand corrected by me. I was just pointing out potential dangers from modern maps.

I actually use modern maps in conjunction with old maps
( paper and on line)

Michael Dixon

[Michael Dixon]

French,

To see the geography of your family's "journey" go to...

www.genuki.org.uk

Sorry that I have no techie skill to do this better... but

>Northumberland>Parishes> then see map of county divided up into it's parishes. the map is "live" or whatever it is called, and you can click on a parish to get into the whole a-z of that parish, including history, geography, etc.

There is also a similar arrangement for County Durham map/parishes.


If you get into Houghton-le-Spring parish section... >Church Records> will reveal it's marriages from early doors..

I see you folk married on New Year's Eve 1808 !

______________________________

Coal Mines.... to get gobsmacked about numbers of mines ... try this...

Go to www.dmm.org.uk
(this is web site of the "Durham Mining Museum... it covers mines outside of Co Durham....)

From alpha menu at top, choose H-le-S colliery..... one of the sub-sections in " Other mines within 5 miles"

This will help answer your question  " were there a lot of coal mines up there ? "

Michael Dixon

[frenchdressing]

ThaI'm very grateful for all the suggestions and info you've all given. I feel more "involved" in the North East now.
 I've also seen that there are loads of Clementsons in the NE. Perhaps my dad's family originated from there as well even though it says that Joseph was born in Lancashire in 1817. I went to the records office in Wigan when I was in England last week and found just one baptism for a Cleminson from 1800 to 1837. So, it wasn't a popular name there.
There's 40cm of snow here and -10°C temperatures so I can spend the weekend looking up the sites you suggested.

Thanks again.

Regards

French

[Michael Dixon]

French,

This is like table-tennis, but I am keeping the rally going..

You raise the topic of "popular names"... I bat back this..

Surname of Clementson very much rooted in Cumberland, then Northumberland, just to a lesser degree.

In 1881 it was the 7930th most used surname in GB. By 1998 it had dropped to 10,179th.

I think that should tire you.

( Source of my stats is web site called "Surname Profiler", you can get it via Google )


Michael Dixon

PS.. I used parishes, not cos it was a clever idea, but cos it was the "currency" of the day......

for describing land,
for prescibing land overship,
for delivering items to correct destination
for determining where folk got bapt/married/buried
for deciding which parish should foot the bill for pauper "relief"

The hierarchy of places was...

County
Parish
Township*
Town or Village
Individual Community
Landmarks like streams, hills, houses .. e.g. Flat Roof Row

Township... an unfortunate term, handed down to confuse us.... it had nothing to do with a town. Township was just a convenient sub-division of a parish.
 For example, taking your parish of H-le-S.... Warden Law was one of the parish's several townships... had TWELVE folk living there in 1811

(The Irish equivalent was "townland", which could be as small as a field, with NO people ).

More or less, Townships became ecclesiastical parishes in their own right, and/or today's Civil Parishes.

Enough !

[frenchdressing]

Michael,
Where did all the Clementsons go? Did they all emigrate?
How many townships could there be in a parish? Was there a limit? Was there just one church in a parish?
Being a nuisance I know but I really don't know the answer.
Regards
French

[Michael Dixon]

French,

Now you are putting spin on the ball !

I will start off with the term "Ancient Parish",

Each parish had one church. ( A bit "chicken and egg" here)

Broadly speaking each county was made up of a number of parishes, which did not span county borders ( Bound to be an exception somewhere, sometime)

Now this church would be Anglican/Church of England.. Henry VIII etc..... with at times no churches of other denominations... banned for e.g. Gunpowder Plot etc.

For a period up to July 1837 the only LEGAL way to marry in England/Wales was in a CofE church ( Jews and Quakers were excused from this mandatory rule)

So say in 1830, there were Catholic Churches, which would/could baptise RCs and bury them, but barred from marrying them.

Some Catholics, and Methodists, Presbyterians etc, either
married in the "wrong" church, or lived together without marrying ( the resulting illegitamacy brought complications for hereditary angles and stigma, etc.) or went "abroad" to marry in a country that did not have this restrictive law...
SCOTLAND.

But the 1837 Marriage Act changed these measures, permitting marriages to take place in any place of worship or a Register Office.

As populations grew and shifted, the  parish  felt the need to build "outstation" churches, usually small ones, in the required places. These called chapels "of ease".

Again to do with need of populations, some of these satellite churches got their independence from mother.

In my home are area. St Mary the Virgin at Horton parish, gave birth to a chapel of "ease" at Blyth.. St Mary's.

(St Mary's, Horton  itself,  had once been a chapel of ease, under the sway of St Mary the Virgin at Woodhorn)

St Mary's, Blyth ( now in middle of rapidly developing town)
became an independent parish.

Today St Mary's, Horton stands alone in a rural area with hardly any people living about it.

The word "Parish" to researchers, is a sort of jargon, meaning the area of land administered by a Church of England church. So "Parish" = CofE

The areas administered by churches of other religious demoninations were then not referred to as " parishes".

I knew that  the RC Church decided to tread carefully after laws were relaxed... and so avoided dedicating their churches to the same saint as the CofE had done. And they avoided the term "parish".  Todau of course is now different.

In some libraries/archives today, you might see shelves, drawers labelled up " Parish Records 1650-1870"   and others " Other Denominations" or "Non-Conformist Church records" etc.

Now  bear in mind, the above is but a crude summary of something that was complicated and evolved through history... I have book called "A thousand years of the English Parish" ( by Anthea Jones) and it is 330 pages long!


The size and number of townships were not set by rules, but by need

There is a photo of St Michael's H-le-S "parish" church on that Genuki site I listed earlier.

Michael Dixon

[frenchdressing]

Thanks Michael, that's really interesting. Maybe that's why I couldn't find my Joseph Clementson in Wigan if he wasn't baptised in a C of E church.
 I also noticed an enormous number of "bastard" children in the registers. Maybe it was that the parents just didn't marry in the church and the children had two parents after all. Quite a few of them were the 2nd or 3rd illigitimate child. The vicar seemed to take some pleasure in recording the fact.
Do people still say they were the good old days?

Best regards

French

[Michael Dixon]

French,

this is not proven, but is so from my own experience of sticking my nose into "parish" records and RC church records.

*The early doors "parish" vicars ( say, throughout 1700s) were blunt and unkind about illegitimacy, but this seemed to abate into 1800s. Now this was maybe kindness or understanding, but might also be linked to the universal introduction of a pre-printed register, as opposed to the earlier blank volumes, reducing the opportunities to ad-lib.

** Catholic priest also had to contend with illegitimate baptisms, but seemed not to add comments and just show the illegitimacy clear by recording the surname of child the same as the mother's , with father's bit blank..



Looking at Wigan ( on Genuki site) I notice that there were/are ? more than 30 churches within 3 miles ffrom centre of Wigan.

Just a wee angle.. if you are going to "drink deep" on north-easr history etc, let me aim you ar Co Durham, rather than Northumberland.. as Caroline's parents seemed to be Durham folk... marrying there, ( (having Caroline in Northumberland) and bringing up Caroline there !

Michael Dixon