Non Conformist Records – Compilation 1-3 – Introduction

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

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: 6 July, 2010 -
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.