Newland parish records (General)

by grahamdavison , Saturday, August 04, 2007, 03:20 (6323 days ago) @ admin

A number of people have been enquiring about the Newland registers so I thought I should try and explain the situation.

The first register which covers the period 1560-1667 has been badly damaged by rats and so many entries are either missing or partly gnawed away!! The transcriber purchase this register on fiche and has done the best he can. To date the Record Office have declined to produce the register for me to photograph, but I hope to persuade them to let me do that later in August or September.

We have photographed the second register which covers the period 1670-1740, but that is also badly gnawed and suffers from much the same problems.

The register from 1752-1783 is missing, but fortunately the Record Office has a copy of the Parish Clerk`s draft entries May 1749 - June 1784 and we have used these to fill the gap. However I suspect that this draft may not contain the entries from the various Chapelries in Newland parish.

There is also a Parish Clerk`s draft of entries from Feb 1786 - 1819, these have not yet been photographed, but could be used to cross check the registers from 1783 - 1798 & 1799 - 1812. This would be a useful addition as there are a few missing months in the parish registers.

The marriages 1754 - 1812 haven`t yet been photographed, I plan to do this in two weeks time and to put them out to transcription before the end of August, hopefully they will be on the site in about 8 weeks time.

I notice the Record Office also holds an index to baptisms, marriage & burials 1670 - 1799 which was made in the 18th & 19th Centuries. I will have a look at that in a couple of weeks time to see if it could be used to improve the transcripts.

There are also the BTs, I had a look at the pre-1610 ones, but they were in very poor condition and virtually unusable. However I will photograph them up to 1812 at some future date and see if they can also be used to improve the transcripts.

As I hope you can see Newland is proving to be quite a difficult parish to get an accurate transcription for, the transcriber has done his best with very poor material and I thought it would be useful to put this on the site and update it as we go.

As far as the post 1812 records are concerned I am still awaiting the marriages 1813 - 1837 & the burials 1813 - 1846, otherwise we are complete up to 1900+. I have just chased up the transcribers so hopefully these records will appear in the not to distant future.

I hope this is helpful, if you have any further questions I will do my best to help.

Graham Davison
Project Coordinator