MYSTERIES OF PARISH REGISTERS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 107, 12 November 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

MYSTERIES OF PARISH REGISTERS.

How valuable old parish registers, hiden away, maybe, in the vaults of a village church, are, is llustrated by the recent offer of £I,OOO for the recovery of the parish registers of Cawdor, Nairnshaw, for the years 177 V 1783, which are wanted in connection with the settlement of an estate.

Through carelessness or ignorance of their value as records, parish registers have gone through 6ome strange vicissitudes. A former clerk of Plungar, Leicestershire, for instance, who combined the sale of grooeries with his parish duties, made the registers serve him in a-business capacity by employing them to wrap up his wares. Ailother parish clerk cut the registers up to serve as patterns for the lacemaking of his daughters. It has been proved that in many cases the vicar only wrote up his record at the end of the year from the clerk's note-book, and that worthy, thinking more of his fees than the instruction of posterity, was content to book only such as owed him money. One painstaking vicar who superintended the souls of Seasalter, however, was wont to append pen portraits of those whom he married, and one wonders of ho took advantage of his clergyman's privilege of kissing the bride when he joined "John Housden, a gape-mouth-od, lazy fellow, to Hannah Matthews, a nold, toothless, wriggling hag," to quote his description of them in the registers of his parish. The origin of parish regsters dates back to 1538, when Cromwell, Henry VIII.'s general, issued an injunction to the clergy to keep a reuord of births, marriages, and deaths. And the explanaton of the gaps n ancent parish registers lies in the fact that during William lll.'s war with France they were used to a.ssist in the collection of a tax on births and marriages, which was frustrated by the parch clerks, for as one of them naively notes in lm register, "No entries were made for some years to avoid the tax."