Fun with Parish records

[brigidmac]

Today I've been looking into one family in a small village in Northamptonshire.

Instead of just getting the baptism   details for m1787 I decided to look at some pages before & after to find other children of the same couple and burials in the same time frame

Eventually I looked at pages from 1750- 1810

I learnt so much
Seeing how many baseborn births are registered per page
I wonder if this is typical
1 woman seems to have had 3 baseborn children over 7 years

1 page per year becomes 2 pages per year in later years

Many more births are registered than deaths
I wonder if there was less compulsion to register deaths

Some  couples produce nearly 1 child per year for about a decade .

Some future spouses had baptisms on the same page


I'm now going to look at the rest of the pages from 1706

[KGarrad]

When I was looking at Presentments (for Fornication) at the Manx Museum, some names seemed to appear regularly!

[brigidmac]

I've never seen anything like that but I'm looking at a marriage on 1 page + predicting birth on the next

Just found twins born 5 months after a marriage

I'm wondering if this was one of those places where men wanted to know their wives could bear children before committing

[KGarrad]

Well, you wouldn't buy a car without test driving it, would you?

[Annie65115]

I started a thread a little while ago about this. I used to spend hours at the archives, reading through parish registers, recognising the same names over and over, spotting newcomers as they arrived in the villages, reading annotations by the clerks etc (a favourite was something along the lines of "this morning a huge conglomeration of larks flew over from the moor"). You could see who was a pauper, who lived in the "big house"; sometimes causes of death would be listed in the register, or there would be a note as to why a marriage didn't go ahead.

Searching online for PR entries is very much quicker but you don't get that feeling of continuity of village life, or that rudimentary understanding of how people lived together. And I think that is quite a big loss.

[g eli]

I often look through parish records checking on extra children or other information. I came across one where so much more information was given on people that had been buried that I felt that I knew them, I wish there were more like those.

[brigidmac]

I also like the names which come and go out of fashion

In this village there was a family with surname SILENCE but I saw it as a first name in 2 other families

Also only 1 Hephzibah so far .
 Patience + a Comfort ( I have a Botswana friend called Comfort

[Andrew Tarr]

Just found twins born 5 months after a marriage.  I'm wondering if this was one of those places where men wanted to know their wives could bear children before committing

I'm surprised that you haven't noticed this before.  My interpretation is that the 'stigma' we are used to about marriage while pregnant may be a 20th-century 'convention'.  I think most of my ancestors were fairly conventional people, but births only a few months after marriage seemed almost to be the norm.  I believe that once a couple were engaged (had publicly plighted their troth), atrocities usually began, and if pregnancy followed, a wedding was quickly arranged and everything was corrected.  If no conception followed, the union could be deemed inauspicious, no-one had been married, and different partners could be found ?  No harm done !

[MaecW]

Atrocities  ??