FreeREG Huntingdonshire: New Parish Register Transcriptions Added

I just checked the parish records for Huntingdonshire to see that eight parishes had updates on 19 July, which I've listed below.

I'm interested to check out a couple of those parishes, to see if the new records can fill any gaps I've got.

Parish	Church	Baptisms	Marriages	Burials
Alconbury Cum Weston PR & BTs BTs-some years missing	St Peter and St Paul	1559-1875	1604-1626,  1660-1750,  1755-1876	1604-1626,  1633-1842
Alwalton	St Andrew	1576-1672,  1697-1811,  1813-1877	1577-1681,  1698-1812	1577-1673,  1697-1812
Brington	All Saints	1658-1878	1837-1876	1813-1876
Diddington	St Lawrence	1689-1877	1699-1753,  1755-1836	1697-1879
Great Gransden	St Bartholomew	1538-1653,  1701-1876	1538-1653,  1701-1752,  1754-1837	1540-1653,  1753-1877
Huntingdon	All Saints	1558-1876	1559-1876	1558-1875
Stanground	St John the Baptist	1539-1557,  1660-1876	1538-1875	1538-1657,  1661-1862
Yaxley	St Peter	1653-1854	1653-1812	1653-1809,  1813-1875

Wouldn't it be magical if every parish was available immediately!  Unfortunately there are millions of records and FreeREG relies on the hard work of volunteers - and don't have unlimited access to the records themselves or it'd certainly be easier/quicker to achieve that.

Of course, there are other ways to get the parish records, but FreeREG is a great free resource for family history records and parish registers.

Image: FreeREG

Parish Records: St Michael & All Angels, Caldecote, Cambridgeshire. Update

I've been keeping an eye on the Parish Records of a few churches, including the Parish Records of St Michael & All Angels, Caldecote, Cambridgeshire.  These have been transcribed on the FreeREG site and I was pleasantly surprised to notice that in the last few days there's been an update of the records.

The years now available on FreeREG for St Michael & All Angels, Caldecote, Cambridgeshire are:

• Baptisms: 1662-1875
• Marriages: 1676-1880
• Burials: 1671-1885

These are really new records that have been added!  The dates covered before were only up to 1876. So I'm off to see what I can discover!  This transcription of the parish records must nearly be 100% complete! I'm so lucky ... although there are many parishes I am not lucky with, but it's nice to have one parish that's well covered.

This is so exciting, I was looking for a burial in 1903-1905!  Thank you to the volunteer for FreeREG who transcribed these records!

EDIT:  Found it!  That's for another post as it solves a doubt!  Two women of the same name were registered as dying in the area and I knew one was my GG-grandmother.  Now I know which one!

Last checked/updated: October 2015
Image: Geograph

Caldecote Parish Registers and other Records from CFHS

Cambridgeshire Family History Society (CFHS) have many transcriptions of parish registers and other records, so I need to make a list of the ones I want for Caldecote.  Some of those will include other areas I am interested in, e.g. Bourn, Toft and Kingston - and some other records transcriptions will cover even wider areas, e.g. the Petty Sessions.

But, it's a good idea to make a list of what's available, so I know what I need to buy!  It's that dreadful time when you do need to put your hand in your pocket and get the full set of records in your hand, saving you weeks/months of poncing about online trying to do it all for free.

So, here's my CFHS Wishlist:

• Caldecote Parish Registers 1599-1950.  £12 as a CD/download.  Reference number  CD/PR/042. 
  
  
  This also includes the Bourn Parish Registers for 1559-1950.  These will give me the years covered by FreeREG and a further 120 or so years!  It seems to be the most comprehensive transcriptions of parish records available for Caldecote - as the CD includes Bourn and everybody seemed to float between the two villages.  The transcriptions from Caldecote Parish Registers can be viewed, for free, at a Family Research Centre of the LDS, but even the travel to my "local" Centre would cost £5 in fuel. A CD in my own hand gives me 24/7 access on a whim :)  Bargain.  Who'd not want a copy of this??
  
  When you look closer though, the CD doesn't contain all entries from all dates.  Caldecote Marriages are for 1604-1949; Caldecote Banns transcriptions cover 1760-1950; Caldecote Baptisms are transcribed for 1640-1950 and Caldecote Burial transcriptions cover 1640-1950.  So I am unsure where they got the 1599 description from - maybe they found a few sheets, or transcribed a bit more, but didn't update the image as that was harder to do :)
• Cambridgeshire  Monumental Inscriptions for places A-I.  £12 as a CD/download.  Reference number CD/MI/002.  This CD covers Caldecote, as well as many other places.  It's part of a trilogy of CDs and I do intend to get the full set covering Cambridgeshire in time.

Personally, I find the descriptions of what you actually get a little lacking. I don't want to pin all my hopes on something being magnificent, that turns out to be not very useful at all.  That's the sole reason I've not bought them to date, to be honest :)

As I can't view the contents without buying, I'll just have to bite the bullet at some point.  Just these two genealogy CDs would give me all the records available - and (potentially) all the headstones in the graveyards (potentially?), it'd mean I'd have a full set of everything from the parishes of Caldecote and Bourn in one go, for just £24.  And then I could move on - it's surprising just how many parishes you do ultimately feel the need to get the records for.  It's best not to leap in really and consider carefully how far you're prepared to look for where ancestors disappeared to or from!

To compare the CFHS CD with FreeREG, FreeREG says it covers Caldecote from 1604 to 1988, so it looks like the CD will be almost the same data, except banns won't be on FreeREG (maybe).

I've spent months wasting time on the free sites only feeling I've got "so far" into the available data and nailing this once and for all is worth the small cost, although, in this case, FreeREG does seem to compare very well.  The two datasets are from different transcribers.  FreeREG will have been transcribed from the originals via the LDS; CFHS were members transcribing from the originals many years ago.  So both sources were transcribed from the originals, but different people, so there might be just a tiny difference that fills a gap!  (For comparison of Bourn, FreeREG covers 7162 records from 1563 to 1876).  Of course, FreeREG doesn't cover banns (to my knowledge).

I'm off to serve dinner now .... gotta keep the strength up for the next set of mysteries and curiosities I uncover!

Image: CFHS Shop

Phillimore Parish Registers for Huntingdonshire

William Phillimore set out to transcribe all parish registers, starting with marriages, across the whole of the country. Unfortunately, as with many Grand Schemes, he was hampered by the sheer volume of the task, but Phillimore did manage to make a start in Huntingdonshire.

Family tree research was as popular 100-150 years ago as it is today, but they didn't have the Internet!  You'd have to physically visit each church to inspect its parish registers and go through every line for yourself to check if there were any names that were relevant to your tree.  What Phillimore did was to find 150 subscribers, prepared to pay to receive a printed transcription.  He'd then organise, usually alongside the rector of a parish, for a transcriber to work with the original registers.  Once printed and distributed, the subscribers might then have written back to him with their own corrections and a volume might be republished with corrections.

When Phillimore started to print the parish registers of Huntingdonshire in 1912 he was still seeking the vital investment from subscribers:

"In Huntingdonshire there are 95 parishes having Registers beginning before the nineteenth century.  It is calculated that the Marriage Registers of these can be printed in twelve volumes, of which the present is the first, so that if sufficient financial support is forthcoming to enable two volumes a year to be issued, as in other counties, it is possible to complete the whole county in six years.  To enable this to be done thirty more subscribers are needed.  Fifteen more parishes, including the four comprised in the town of Huntingdon, besides Godmanchester and St Ives, are already transcribed and could be sent to press at once. "

Published in October 1912, Volume 1 Huntingdonshire Parish Registers. Marriages. Edited by WPW Phillimore, MA, BCL and WM Noble, Rector of Wistow, covered the following four parishes:

• Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, 1559-1837
• Little Raveley, Huntingdonshire, 1577-1839
• Bury, Huntingdonshire, 1561-1837
• Wistow, Huntingdonshire, 1604-1837

I have not (yet?) found evidence of any further parishes having been published at future dates.  Phillimore's Atlas and Index of Parish Registers was published with a full list of transcribed registers, but I haven't bought a copy of that yet.  This book was published in 1984 and includes over 1800 parish boundary and other maps and details about parish records and where they can be found.

William Phillimore died in 1913, leaving most of his planned work incomplete. At the time of his death he had published over 200 parish registers and inquisitions - all high quality work that is still used daily by genealogists today.

Huntingdonshire Parish Registers Online:

Only 150 originals were printed - many disappearing into libraries around the world.  You can find a copy of the Phillimore book that has been scanned in, or the records themselves, in a few ways, including, but not limited to local family history groups for the area covered and:

• Archive.org - scanned copies of the parish registers are available online at archive.org
• Ebay - scanned copies are available for sale on ebay in CD/PDF format
• Findmypast has the most parish registers online, making it the best website for searching through BMDs, but I checked for the first name in the Phillimore book and it wasn't present.  FindMyPast are working with the Family History Society and local Family History groups to add transcripts, but they are drip-feeding them into their system as part of their marketing strategy, so they could appear at any point.
• Ancestry.co.uk also didn't seem to contain the first entry.

While FindMyPast and Ancestry are great sites for instantly searching many thousands of registers and documents, they can't contain all information, on everything, immediately/today.  It's always good, therefore, to not rely on them, but to build up your own personal library of information.

I had a quick look through for anybody in the Finding family, but just found one that was over 100 years before the dates I was interested in ... but it's nice to have a copy as you never know what you'll find when you're flicking through the pages!

FreeREG Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, Upton, Huntingdonshire

I've been quite lucky that Upton, Huntingdonshire, is one of the parishes that's on FreeREG, meaning I can find the baptisms, marriages and burials at St Margaret, which is the only church in the parish.

Upton, Huntingdonshire

The Upton parish register transcripts were first made available on FreeREG in January 2014. At the time of writing there are 1271 records input, ranging from 1755 to 1877 and the last update/alteration was made in July 2014 and the following years are parish records have been transcribed:

• St Margaret, Upton, Huntingdonshire baptisms:  1784-1876
• St Margaret, Upton, Huntingdonshire marriages:  1755-1812, 1814-1836, 1839-75
• St Margaret, Upton, Huntingdonshire burials:  1784-76

That's quite good coverage except I am not much further forward in completing the jigsaw!  It's good to see records - so thanks to Sheila for taking the time to transcribe these - but when there are gaps it's annoying.  You'd have thought the church might've taken a little more care with their books and records over the years *sigh*.  I think the vicars were more interested in drinking tea with widows than making my life easier.... slackers :)

FreeREG has given me some great finds though, including:
Six baptisms from 1788 to 1809
Four marriages from 1815 to 1828
Three burials from 1807 to 1837

Of course, parish registers are only as good as what was written in them at the time - and if they are legible or weren't lost.  I need to find out the state of these Parish Records and, to see a copy of the originals at some point.

Soundex also yields some further results as the name "Finding" was written in other ways at the parish, including Findin, which actually looks like the record/s I will find useful. The spelling Fineden is also present.  Having said that, the particular marriage I was looking for exists under the name I was looking for: "Finding".  Annoyingly, there is no bride's father's name given!

As the parish of Upton, Huntingdonshire, is tiny, the next step would be to go through the baptisms, to see if it looks like Jane was born in Upton!  At first glance it looks like she was baptised, under the spelling of Findin, in 1803 and her parents were Thomas and Mary.  Obviously making that assumption is a leap of faith and doesn't always work... but, for now, I've got Thomas and Mary pencilled into the chart as potential parents.

Genealogy is the ultimate online game of strategy, cunning, intelligence, perseverance, patience and tenacity, but the rewards are greater than other online pasttimes as you're discovering your own family roots and secrets.

Image by Wikimedia: Upton