Essex Ancestors

[Kit]

Just a quick dash in as I have a one day sub.

Check EVERY page of the registers. I was looking for OH's 3 or 4g grandparents in the baptism register for where they said they were from.

I have a possibility for the grandfather but couldn't find the wife. I kept looking as there were others of the surname of the wife.

I still haven't found the baptism for the wife but I did find a 1796 CENSUS that the minister took, "by personal visitation of each house" and he wrote down the relationship of everyone in the house!!!! (including grandma with her family :d:d)

So it pays to keep searching as who knows what else there is.

[Merry]

Oooh, that's good Toni! A real bonus.

Before I got to the end of your post I was going to say are you sure she was a spinster at marriage, but I won't ask you that now! :D

[Kit]

I had a copy of the marriage register from when it was free Merry so I was as confident as you can be. lol

Nothing to say she was born in the parish though, just lived there.

Her family is strange. Dad married Mum and was a widow. He also changed the spelling of his name and appears to rebaptise all children (both wives) in the new name, a bulk deal. The new wife Ann seems to be called Sarah, the name of the old wife, after the marriage so I am confused and wonder if they just remarried in the new name as well. Name change was changing the last letter from an R to a Y.

Off to have another look and see if I missed anything.

[Nell]

I haven't used Essex Ancestors since they started charging, but I do remember feeling very frustrated when I was going through individual pages of a baptism register, painstakingly reading all the names and trying to decipher them - 3 baptisms for my gt x 3 grandparents all spelt differently! - only to reach the back of the register where there was an alphabetical INDEX!

So my advice would be start at the back and work your way to the front.

[Kit]

I've tried that Nell but none of the ones I've looked at has an index. One register was full of money it collected from various other places and had about 10 pages of BMD's spaced through it. It was very frustrating.

Going back to the 1796 census the minister did the census as he had been told that the French might be invading and he wanted a record of who was where incase they needed to mount a resistance. Failing that he wanted to know who was where so they if they had to leave there was a record for when they were able to return and reclaim their possessions.

[Nell]

Such a shame Essex RO didn't work with Ancestry or FMP or someone else to have the lot transcribed as well as digitised.

I'm just glad I managed to find most of my Smoothys by visiting ERO once for a day and then subsequently on their site when it was free.

[kiterunner]

FamilySearch are working on Essex PR's at the moment.

[Kit]

I'd rather see the records Kate but it's good to have a backup.

[kiterunner]

What I meant was that hopefully we will be able to find the records indexed on FamilySearch and then we will know what to look at on Essex Ancestors.

[maggie_4_7]

Yes that is what I have been doing if not Family Search then FreeReg.

Search first on those two sites to give you a clue where and what year.

Of course doesn't always help and I have had to trawl quite a bit.

[maggie_4_7]

Such a shame Essex RO didn't work with Ancestry or FMP or someone else to have the lot transcribed as well as digitised.

I'm just glad I managed to find most of my Smoothys by visiting ERO once for a day and then subsequently on their site when it was free.

LOL every parish I have trawled I see loads of Smoothys and I think of you :)

[Nell]

Well there are a lot of them around in Essex, Suffolk & Cambridge, but I'm only interested in the ones in Coggeshall and Chelmsford!

[Kit]

What I meant was that hopefully we will be able to find the records indexed on FamilySearch and then we will know what to look at on Essex Ancestors.

That makes sense. I wasn't thinking straight.