Enter a surname, forename,
year, register name, or a combination of these, in
part or whole. e.g. to search for Edwards in Littleport
you could use EDW LITT.
This database was last updated:
10 October, 2011
- 67,242 records
The results will show the relevant
CD appropriate to that entry CD01 equates to CD/NC/01
and so on; these can then be acquired from the Bookstall.
About
the search
The transcribing of non-conformist
records is a very different job to the transcribing
of the Anglican Parish Registers which had a set format.
Before 1837 there tend to be fairly
traditional style non-conformist registers, recording
baptisms or sometimes births, burials and occasionally
marriages – although the actual marriage would
not have taken place in the non-conformist chapel,
there may well have been some sort of blessing.
After 1837 some churches and chapels
kept traditional records, but by far the most commonplace
– and interesting – are the church books,
minute books and rolls of membership. These contain
enormous amounts of information about the beliefs,
daily life and travel of our ancestors.
Some of these records have been deposited
in local Archives and some have been filmed, but the
vast majority of the records are still held by the
relevant church or chapel, and unfortunately in many
cases the records appear to have been lost.
Consequently the job of transcribing
these records is not simple. While we were able to
start – many years ago – with the deposited
and filmed records, mainly for our baptism & burial
1801-1837 project [our “Collection 1], the project
on a larger scale begins with identifying churches
and chapels, tracing contacts, enquiring about records,
gaining permission for transcription and publication,
arranging to photograph the records [the whole project
would be impossible without digital cameras], and
all this before any transcription at all can take
place.
And then of course the work of transcription
is entirely different to parish records – large
ledgers containing minutes of meetings can be tedious
to type and check; accounts difficult to lay out;
and always the question of what will really be of
interest – someone (usually me) has to take
that decision and decide on layout and how best to
index, and so on.
To begin with the records were published
in microfiche format, in collections as they were
completed, and we imagined that eventually we would
be able to complete a section of non-conformity to
publish on CD – perhaps all Methodists in the
Isle of Ely, or all records for a group of parishes
in the south.
But we have had to change our ideas
– firstly because we now realize that it will
be a very long time before we can put together those
complete sections of records – we are still
finding chapels and records. Recently one Baptist
church discovered a suitcase which it had had for
many years which no one had ever looked at –
it contained the entire records of a second Baptist
church which many people had been searching for those
same years.
Secondly we need to discontinue the
production of microfiche; our supplier is really only
producing the material for us as a favour, and the
cost and lead times are rising rapidly, plus fewer
and fewer researchers have the facilities to use them.
We used to say go to your local library, but only
the largest now have readers. Publishing on microfiche
– and supplying to local libraries in hardcopy
– requires the production of a specific type
of index, very different to what we use on CD, and
with the increased difficulty of indexing these diverse
non-conformist records this has become an enormous
task.
And so – we are putting material
onto CD in a seemingly random way – in fact
the first one will contains our “Collections
1-3” plus a few other records. CD 2 will contain
“Collections 4-6” with some more single
records. CD 3 will round up anything we have missed,
plus newly transcribed material which will not have
appeared on microfiche before.
We strongly suspect that this project
will never we truly complete – there will always
be new records found – but we will continue
to work at this very rewarding collection of records
in every way we can.
Searching – The longer documents
such as Church Books and Minute Books usually have
the names of members repeated many times – Deacons
and Ministers for example may appear several times
in one year. Their names have only been indexed once,
and the entire document should be searched for their
surname.
Wendy Doyle and the Projects Team
May 2010
|
The
Cambridgeshire FHS have released the Non-Conformist
CD compilation. Dr Williams's Library is on the second of
the set and is available from the bookstall.