Churchwardens Accounts of England and Wales

The listings in the Churchwardens' Accounts database feature every known church together with any chapels of ease and private chapels found mentioned in printed books and documents, along with the dedication, diocese, archdeaconry, and deanery of each wherever possible. There is also an indication of the population, taken from the Hearth Tax Returns and an early nineteenth century census. Further information will be added as it is gathered – including bibliographic information for each parish.

The search for surviving churchwardens’ accounts has been carried out by visiting all County Record Offices, Local History Libraries, and a few museums. This includes the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight but not the Channel Islands although information provided by the Guernsey and Jersey Record Offices is listed in the database. The accounts that have been located, have been examined and each year of survival is listed with, wherever possible, the total expenditure of each year.

Although the main purpose of this website is to give details of original sources, a search has been made for both modern and antiquarian publications with transcripts and extracts from the churchwardens’ accounts. This information is shown on the appropriate parish pages.

A wonderful resource to help locate a significant part of our ancestors' lives.

#52Ancestors - Week 10 - Worship

Week 10 of #52Ancestors focuses on Worship.  Religion has played a major role in the lives of our ancestors, and how they chose to worship had the potential to impact their lives in many different ways.  The church, faith and religion were central to the lives of so many, and had the potential to impact where people lived, how they earned a living, who they married, even whether they could own land of work in certain professions.

My 3xGreat grandparents Friedrich (Frederick) Carl and Susetta Beseler made the momentous decision to leave their homeland and emigrate to Australia.  The Beseler family arrived in Adelaide on 1 April 1848 on the ship Pauline, having departed their homeland from the port of Bremen, Germany.  Passengers listed were Frederick Beseler, Shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and 5 children.  The family lived in South Australia for several years before travelling overland to Victoria, settling in the area of Learmonth.

The Beseler Family at Ivy Rock Station

 
Large numbers of Germans emigrated to Australia and the United States, mainly for economic and religious reasons. Many emigrants were of the Lutheran faith.

The Lutheran Church in Australia had begun in 1838 with the arrival of about 500 migrants from Prussia, led by their Pastor, August Kavel. They were sponsored personally by George Fife Angas of the South Australian Company, who had taken pity on their religious plight and the persecution they were facing in Prussia.

The Beseler family working on their farm

The Beselers flourished in Australia.  Frederick Beseler was naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1848, and his son Edward followed in 1963.  They purchased land, married and raised families and integrated into the Australian community.  Seeking freedom to worship and the opportunities to own land offered in Australia paid off for the family, as it did for so many others.

Naturalisation Certificate of Frederick Beseler, 1848

Digital Churchyard Mapping Project for the Church of England

The Church of England has launched a new project to map all its churchyards using laser equipment.  They have partnered with surveying company Atlantic Geomatics, who will map Church of England churchyards using backpack-mounted laser scanners, as well as photographing the headstones.  The resulting records will be published on a new website, where they will enable family historians to discover where their ancestors are buried.

Bishop Andrew Rumsey, lead Bishop for church buildings said: “This impressive national project will make a huge difference to those researching family history, as well as easing the administrative burden on parishes.  It will improve management of burial grounds, and make information more fully accessible than ever before, supported by additional services by subscription for those wishing to go further.  It will soon be possible to visit almost any Anglican burial ground in the country and see in real time the location of burial plots. For those researching at distance in the UK or overseas, the digital records will place detailed information from churchyards at their fingertips.”

The project aims to survey the majority of the Church of England’s 19,000 burial grounds by 2028.

The website, which is due to launch in spring 2022, will combine data on burials and biodiversity data on the plants and animals in the churchyards.  It is anticipated the site will provide free to access for Church of England parishes, with additional services available to subscribers. 

After a successful pilot project which mapped the churchyards of All Hallows Church in Kirkburton and Emmanuel Church in Shelley, both in the Diocese of Leeds, the programme has now successfully mapped the churchyard of St Bega in Bassenthwaite in the Diocese of Carlisle.

The live links to the records on these two pilot studies can be found here:

• Kirkburton
• Shelley

Church Heritage Record Announces New Project

It has just been announced that all Church of England burial ground records will be available to search within five years under an ambitious new laser-scanning survey scheme.  Records of the burial grounds for two West Yorkshire churches – All Hallows’ Church in Kirkburton and Emmanuel Church in Shelley – are now available online, and the Church plans to survey all 15,000 burial grounds by 2025.

Nick Edmonds, the Church of England’s senior media officer, said: “It’s a system that has potential for enormous growth and future usage.  It can help people with their family history and accessing burial grounds that they didn’t know about before."  Each burial record will include the name of the deceased, their burial date, their age at death and a photograph of the grave.

The databases will be available via the Church Heritage Record.  Currently the Church Heritage Record website contains over 16,000 entries on church buildings in England covering a wide variety of topics including architectural history, archaeology, art history and the surrounding natural environment. The website is still currently a work in progress and is by no means complete.

The Church will provide £250,000 towards the project and has received the same amount from Historic England, which has also provided spatial data records to support the project.  The scanning also has ecological benefits, by measuring the growth of trees and plants in the graveyards.  It will also help church authorities identify where empty space is available for new burials.

Statistical Accounts of Scotland

The Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online provides access to digitised and fully searchable versions of both the Old Statistical Account (1791-99) and the New Statistical Account (1834-45). These detailed parish reports, written by Church of Scotland ministers, detail social conditions in Scotland and are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Scottish history.   They note basic details about the parishes in question: the industries that were followed, the religious denominations present, the names of key landholders, the topography of the area, and even the nature of the inhabitants themselves.

You can search with a place name or a keyword, for example Glasgow or mills, then click on the map. A new map will open where you can click on any county, to see the parishes in that county. You can then select a parish and view the available reports.

The website allows basic searches for free and charges a subscription fee for access to additional features such as print and download, the ability to tag and annotate pages and many more. Otherwise the service is run on a not-for-profit basis and the subscription fees only cover the cost of hosting and maintaining the website.

Week 23 - Going to the Chapel - 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 23 - Going to the Chapel - immediately brings to mind the church my father's family regularly attended in Fordham, Essex. 

Old postcard featuring Fordham Church

Fordham All Saints church was build in approximately 1340 and restored in 1861.  In 1965 it was designated a Grade 1 listed building.  It was my father's family church for many generations and their home was only a few minute's walk away.

Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday 1 Jan 1904

As in many small villages, the Church was at the centre of village life.  Many of the records I have for my family centre around the church - baptisms, weddings, funerals, Sunday School, fundraising and poor relief - and several such events were not only to be found in the church records but also reported in local newspapers, such as the funeral above.

Fordham Church - several of the old headstones belong to my Green family 

It is wonderful that the old church still stands and is used today by new generations, and I hope one day to make the journey back to England and visit it myself.

Monks in Motion - Lives of the Benedictines

The project 'Monks in Motion', led by Dr James Kelly of Durham University, is shedding light on the lives of the Benedictine monks from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. This newly launched database details the membership and activities of the English and Welsh Benedictine order from the time of Mary I's reign until 1800.

Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII, the first English Benedictine monastery in exile was established in Douai in 1607. It was followed by a further three monasteries across France and Germany. Prior to these foundations, which provided a nationalized focus, some aspiring English monks joined European communities, entering religious life in Catholic countries such as Spain. Living in these exiled communities but also returning to England to serve on the Catholic mission, the English Benedictines’ mobility made them unusual amongst the Order in Catholic Europe.

The database only includes those individuals who entered the Benedictine life (for however short or long a time) after Elizabeth I came to throne in England in 1558. The monks have been recorded according to their place of entry, the majority under one of the four foreign English foundations – St Gregory’s, Douai; St Laurence’s, Dieulouard; St Edmund’s Paris; Ss Adrian and Denis, Lamspringe.  A final group of monks are recorded under ‘Elsewhere’, cataloguing all those who cannot be included under the previous groupings. It includes those Scottish monks who were aggregated to the English Benedictine Congregation.

Chruch of Ireland Gazette goes online

Almost 70 years of editions of the Church of Ireland Gazette, the Church of Ireland’s weekly newspaper, have been published online for free by the Representative Church Body Library.
The editions date from March 1856, when the paper first appeared, to December 1923, after the Irish Free State was declared, and cover both modern Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Historian Dr Miriam Moffitt said: “The Gazette is wonderful because it provides not only an outline of the events that impacted on the Church over the last 150 years, but also because it gives us an insight into the attitudes of its readership.”
The Gazette ran birth, marriage and death notices relating to clergymen and their families, as well as news stories, columns and advertisements.  Maybe you can find out more about events in your family's parish or other interesting snippets about their lives.

Irish Records coming online

The National Library of Ireland has announced that it will give free online access to its archive of Catholic Church records, the earliest of which dates back to the 1700s and spans the 1740s to the 1880s. The records are considered the single most important source of information on Irish family history prior to the 1901 Census. They cover 1,091 parishes throughout Ireland, and consist primarily of baptismal and marriage records.

Currently, the National Library provides free access to its microfiche records at its research rooms in Kildare Street, in Dublin. However access has been hampered in recent years by high demand and increased pressure on resources.
This is great news for those of us with Irish heritage, especially if you are like me and trying to trace ancestors from the other side of the world.

Clergymen of England

Was your ancestor a clergyman?  The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 (CCEd), launched in 1999 and makes available and searchable the principal records of clerical careers from over 50 archives in England and Wales with the aim of providing coverage of as many clerical lives as possible from the Reformation to the mid-nineteenth century.
The CCEd’s major features include:

• Records relating to the major events of clerical careers – ordination, appointments as curates, rectors and lecturers
• Information about parishes, chapelries and the many secular institutions and persons with chaplains
• Information about patrons, many of them women
• Information about schools and schoolteachers
• Two search engines, one ‘Basic’ and the other ‘Advanced’, for investigating the records, as well as a Browse facility
• A website, containing a host of useful aids, such as descriptions and maps for dioceses, lists of bishops and parishes, a glossary of terms, and an Online Journal containing essays and ‘notes and queries’

Church of Ireland Gazette

The Church of Ireland has put online all 52 editions of the church’s official weekly gazette for the year 1913. The Church of Ireland gazette essentially served as the weekly newspaper for the church. It lists specific names, places and events that occurred in 1913. The gazette can be searched by keyword or phrase.