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My parish ‘census’ dream
The Minister of Culture back in the 1990s asked for suggestions to mark the 2000 Millennium. I suggested a ‘Genealogy Centre for the Englishspeaking peoples’ located conveniently for all in the centre of England. The Minister’s aide asked for further thoughts which I submitted but I heard nothing more. Is it worth trying again, to see if the idea has some merit? Indeed, perhaps this is something we as genealogists could accomplish ourselves, perhaps digitally.
Let me explain.
Five families of my antecedents come from the same village in Lincolnshire, Cumberworth, and there are another six with links but somewhat more tenuous.
The village in 1801 had a population of 132, the population of England was at that time 8 million approximately. Going back to 1600 the population of the country was 5 million approximately. This, with a constant of 12,600 parishes in England, I thought it possible to create a ‘census’ record for my village of interest by trawling through the village parish records year by year from 1600 to 1800 and recording the year and readable names etc. I then placed the recordings on seven A3 sheets that I had prepared: portrait orientation, with the years 1600 to 1800 running down the left-hand side of each page, and colums labelled A to Z running across the top of the seven pages (A to B on the first sheet, C to G on the second and so on, the last sheet being W to Z). Should you wish to create your own paper census for your village, I would recommend:
• Ruling feint lines horizontally so that you can follow the chosen year of the census more accurately
• Always use pencil
• And you will need an eraser
The result will make interesting reading. The point of this letter is that, if we wished, 12,600 genealogists could create a national ‘census’ (with certain limitations, mainly the condition of the original parish records) for any year predating 1800.
I thought you might like to know just what set me off looking into the possibility of creating a census of Cumberworth people.
My 3x great-grandfather Thomas Keal married Mary Ann Snell in Cumberworth on 25 November 1803. In addition, I have a sampler which my father said was from our Lincolnshire line, done by Maria Bell who was in her 13th year in 1810. Well, we have looked high and low for Maria and she could not be found so I decided to trawl though the Cumberworth parish record.
The following families in the village are of a direct interest to me, so making it a more interesting exercise: Willey, Graves, Willerton, Rigol/Riggal, Adlard, Halgarth and Ladley. There are about five or six other families with possible links, and this is quite a lot when considering that the population of the village was, as I said, just 132 in 1801. I would particularly like to correspond with those researchers who have an interest in the Keals of the Chapel/ Cumberworth area.
The joy of the final record is that it is for all the families that occupied a village, providing of course that the original parish records can be read, or alternatively the Bishops’ Transcripts have been consulted to fill in missing details and so provide a more complete record. Better still the record created provides, at a glance, a view of the comings and goings of the people in the village.
I used to be in the electronics industry and remember the pick and place assembly of components onto a printed circuit board.
Perhaps a recording of the parish ‘censuses’, as outlined above, and collated into a vast online database could be a technological approach to completing a definitive record – that is when we get that National Centre for Genealogical Studies I proposed – hopefully in time for the 2066 millennium! Thank you for your interest.
Ivor Lee