My 4x grt grandparents (Robt Shand & Jane (Jean) England) appear in what appears to be 2 registries.
What is with the dual entry? My guess is that the Rothiesmay entry (I have photocopy scan) is civil, and Portsoy Episcopal is the church the deed was done in. Is this correct? Or are they both the same?
No, that is not correct. They are both the same.
There is no such thing as civil registration before 1855. Therefore these are both church records.
Double entries in the church registars are not unusual, and what they generally tell you is that one of the couple lived in one parish and the other in another parish. You need to look at the originals to find out who lived in which parish. Does your Rothiemay extract say anything about that? NB it is Rothiemay, not Rothiesmay. Including the 's' could hamper your future research online
There is another aspect to this particular example, which is that if the marriage was conducted in Portsoy, or one of the parties lived in the parish of Fordyce, it ought also to have been recorded in the Fordyce Church of Scotland registers, because the C of S was supposed to record all marriages in the parish, regardless of which denomination the actual ceremony was, or where it was held. However I know of several marriages in the Portsoy Episcopal registers which are not in the C of S register as they should be, so the probability is that the Fordyce parish clerk either did not know about the marriages, or failed to record them for some other reason.
It was normal for a wedding ceremony to be held in the bride's home, though if she was in service a long way from her parents' home or her parents were dead, it might be held in her employer's house or in the manse. Weddings in the church building itself were the exception rather than the rule.
I see that the IGI also has a 'submitted' listing of the marriage in Speymouth. 'Submitted' listings can range from pure fantasy to information from family bibles, so they need to be treated with caution until you have tracked down and read the original source.
So you have a marriage which may have been recorded in three different places, and a string of missing baptisms. It would not surprise me to find that the children had been baptised into the Episcopal Church (note again that this does not necessarily mean that they were actually baptised in the church building).
All the IGI birth references to children of Robert Shand and Jean England are 'submitted' except that of Alexander, baptised in Tyrie on 21 December 1820.
As it happens, I have looked briefly at the England family in Speymouth on behalf of another researcher. If you are interested in that, please PM me with your e-mail address as there's too much to post in this forum.
