For anyone researching family history, parish registers are invaluable. Baptisms, marriages, and burials recorded by local churches often provide the only surviving evidence of ordinary lives before civil registration began. Yet these records are far from perfect.
Errors in parish registers were surprisingly common. Clergy and parish clerks worked by hand, often writing entries quickly after long services or busy feast days. Names could be misspelled, dates entered incorrectly, and ages estimated rather than confirmed. A single person might appear under several different spellings across their lifetime.
Illiteracy also played a role. Many parishioners could not spell their own names, so the recorder wrote what he heard. Regional accents and dialects added another layer of confusion. “Smyth,” “Smith,” and “Smithe” might all refer to the same family.
Some mistakes were more serious, and in a few cases, ministers simply forgot to record events altogether.
The clerk of this parish register found by one of research team today helpfully included the note 'In the last marriage on this page Mary Kemp was wrote for Elizabeth Kemp by mistake.' At least the clerk owned up to this one, and went back and changed the register! This is not always the case, making genealogical research more of a puzzle.
If you have any 'brick walls' to overcome in your family tree, contact us today for a free quotation from our team of professional genealogists.
