An Introduction to Parish Registers

If you’ve tried to do your family tree before, you know all about the “joy” of parish registers. We thought we would give you a very basic introduction in this blog post if you’ve never given them a second thought before now, or in case you’re idly considering starting to work on your family tree and are a little daunted at the prospect. Bad news: you should be daunted, because there’s a lot of them and your ancestors are not guaranteed to have stayed in one area and made it easy for you. Good news: they can be a treasure trove of information, some of it rather amusing, and Local Studies have got an extensive transcribed collection to help you out when Ancestry or FindMyPast can’t decipher the handwriting and are holding back results from you in your search. Read on for more information and to see some examples of noteworthy Calderdale parish registers.

Parish registers were first legislated during the reign of Henry VIII – partly to deal with questions around lineage and inheritance, partly to force churches to conform post-dissolution, and partly to ensure that there was an accurate way of knowing who was where (and in what numbers, in case of the need to send an army abroad or raise an army against an internal enemy). Enforcement of record-keeping was haphazard due to sectarian differences and the lack of any consistent way of checking up on parishes, but by the Reformation there was more or less consistent record-keeping of births, marriages and deaths in parishes across Britain. At least for Church of England records – Catholics and non-conformists kept, or sometimes didn’t keep, their own records and eventually this was dealt with via the Hardwicke Marriage Act in 1753 which required all marriages to take place in the Anglican parish church regardless of the denomination of the two people getting married. This was also known as the “Act for the Prevention of Clandestine Marriage” which gives you a clue into some of the concerns around what were then deemed to be “improper” marriages taking place outside of the organised Church.

If you think parish registers are dry, data-heavy reading, think again. Todmorden falls into two parish areas – one within what was the diocese of York and one within Rochdale. Cross Stone St. Paul’s and Heptonstall St. Thomas’s registers (within Yorkshire’s jurisdiction) were started around 1593, but St. Mary’s (within Rochdale’s) started a little later in 1666. Any record keeping that took place prior to that was inconsistent or not stored properly, but the new curate, Henry Krabtree, was keen to begin complying with the law and recording all births, marriages and deaths in a more organised manner. Krabtree is a famous figure amongst students of British occultism and his compliance is characteristically of a more oddly expressed nature. Cross Stone’s registers are fairly straightforward; St. Mary’s have what you could diplomatically call “editorialising”.

The above entry is the most extreme, but other entries included astrological signs and information about the hour of death or small asides about the character of the deceased. Ruth Feilden who died in May 1670 was “well buried – a good turn out”. Edmund Kewshaw who died in June 1669 was buried “with all mens consent” – as in, it’s about time! And spare a thought for poor Susan, “w.[ife of the] ungodly Nicholas Hoarley”, buried in February 1671. Even after Krabtree died, his successors remained somewhat casual when it came to how they recorded events and would use nicknames in the registers kept at the church itself. By the late 1600s St. Mary’s was more or less fully complying with the law, which required one set of registers to be kept at the parish church and one to be sent to the diocese Bishop.

In terms of non-conformist registers, we have some available to look at both on the open shelves and on request, but you may find again that Ancestry, FindMyPast or your local Family History Society are also necessary to consult. Sometimes registers never made it into print or are still held in private hands, and in those cases a local FHS may be able to supply something you’re lacking. Non-conformist registers are more or less similar to CofE registers but may include supplementary information such as the mother’s name, or with burial records, the age of the person being buried. This is enormously helpful when you’re struggling to wade through multiple parishioners with the same surname during times when certain forenames were fashionable. Records are always only as good as the record keepers and the more information included the better. Halifax St. John the Baptist’s registers helpfully almost always include the township that each person getting married lived in, whereas Heptonstall St. Thomas did not for most of their length, and Bradford Cathedral only fitfully. Also, remember the Hardwicke Act mentioned earlier? For your non-conformist ancestors, you may need to consult two sets of records – births and deaths/burials for the chapel or congregation in question, and marriages for the parish.

People did move around in those days, especially in the Lancashire-Calderdale-Bradford sphere, due to the textile and woollen industries taking hold and the trade being done between areas. It isn’t uncommon to find a man from Heptonstall marrying a woman from Burnley in 1680, and their granddaughter marrying a man from Halifax in 1745, and then moving to Bradford to start a family. So if you have local ancestors you’re trying to trace, don’t rule out families migrating from one area to another for work (permanently or temporarily), or your male ancestor deciding that he was related to too many of his near neighbours and looking further afield for a wife. Be willing to take the time to sit down and look at old maps to see the packhorse trails and trade routes from area to area, and look at the industrial history of those areas, and think about not just what is possible but what is likely to have happened.

This is why you should check not only the Yorkshire Archaeological Society registers but also, if need be, the Lancashire Parish Register Society registers. Bradford Cathedral’s parish registers are so enormous that transcriptions of them in their entirety don’t exist, and would be a terrifying task to transcribe, so you will have to rely a little more on online resources and click through scanned pages to find what you want. The Bradford Antiquary published selections of transcriptions in their magazine, which we have bound copies of, and you can also purchase some burial records of the Cathedral, but other satellite churches have their own transcripts of records that you need to hunt down individually online or at West Yorkshire Archives.

One useful thing about register transcripts is that the transcribers have often, either in the index or in the body of the main text, standardised the various spellings of forenames and surnames. Here you can see an exact transcript of the register from a YAS edition, and how the name Christopher could be written as “Christopher” or “Xpofer”. This is a good reason to not necessarily only use online resources for working on your family tree, as the word recognition software that Ancestry and FindMyPast use don’t always pick up these variations.

You can also see that the registers weren’t shy about noting when a child was illegitimate (“base” = bastard). If paternity had not already been recognised prior to birth, you might instead see “reputed father” next to the man’s name. Illegitimate children were a “problem” both for society and for law and order, and parishes took child maintenance surprisingly seriously for the time. Money would be collected at the same time as poor relief was being dispensed and the exchange between father and mother was effectively mediated by the parish itself. A reputed father would have to prove in court that he was not the father of the child in question to escape responsibility. As an aside, if you find yourself looking at old wills for information, you might see an illegitimate but recognised child described as someone’s “natural son/daughter”.

I could write more, but you’d be exhausted reading it – the world of parish registers and their entries, how things were worded, what was said and not said, even causes of death can be fascinating and illuminating reading (a future post will be discussing the 1631 plague and its memorialisation in historical resources held here). Even if you aren’t actively doing any family tree work it’s worth popping in and browsing some of the registers. You never know what creative writing prompts or rabbitholes of interest might be waiting to be seen by just the right person.