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Begin with the Three Registers

Every Anglican parish in England has kept registers of baptisms, marriages and burials since 1538, when Thomas Cromwell instructed the clergy to record them. For West Country families, those registers are usually the first firm footing you get. They sit in the county record office, often on microfilm or as digital images, filed under the parish name rather than the surname you are chasing.

Work from what you know towards what you do not. A burial gives you a date and an abode. A marriage gives you two families, and after 1754 the parishes both parties came from. A baptism gives you the father's name, often his occupation, and occasionally the mother's maiden name in the margin. Take the three together and a family begins to take shape.

Remember the vocabulary of the period. Baptism is not birth; burial is not death. An entry may be dated to the day it happened, or to the day it was written up, which might be weeks later.

Read the Entry Properly

Copy everything, not just the name and the date. The abode matters most of all in rural parishes, because it is frequently a hamlet, tithing or farm rather than the village itself. Two men called John Chubb, both of this parish, become two very different people when one is "of Chubbs Farm" and the other "of Combe".

Look closely at what the clerk wrote around the name:

• Occupations — husbandman, yeoman, mariner, miner, thatcher, cordwainer. These narrow the likely records and sometimes reveal migration, as with a Devon mariner appearing in a Cornish port.
• Latin tags — filius, filia, uxor, vidua, and the occasional "base-born" or "foundling" note, which may point to a bastardy bond among the parish papers.
• Marginal notes — affidavits confirming burial in woollen cloth in the later seventeenth century, or the names of witnesses to a marriage.
• Status words — pauper, sojourner, stranger. These flag that the family was moving and may appear in settlement records.

Spelling was not fixed, so search every variant you can think of: Tremayne and Tremain, Wills and Willes, Hocking and Hockin. Cornish names in particular shift a letter or two between one clerk and the next.

Bishop's Transcripts: A Second Opinion

From 1598 the clergy were required to send an annual copy of the register to the bishop or archdeacon. These bishop's transcripts were made on parchment, sometimes by a different hand, and they now live in the diocesan record office. They are the single most useful cross-check available to you.

They earn their keep in three ways. They can cover a gap where the register itself has rotted, been burned, or been lost. They can resolve a name that is illegible in the register. And they can expose an error, because a transcriber working in haste may have misread a date or a surname that the original register still shows clearly.

Use them knowing their weaknesses. They are frequently incomplete for the 1640s and 1650s, and for years when a parish was between incumbents. Where the two sources disagree, note both readings in your notes rather than silently choosing one.

Memorial Inscriptions in the Churchyard

Gravestones and memorial tablets inside the church often give relationships and ages that registers leave out. In Devon and Cornwall, slate headstones have held their lettering remarkably well, and a good gravestone can hand you a whole family group in a single glance.

Record the inscription exactly, including phrases such as "also of" and "who died", the stated age, and any masons' marks or verse. Then treat it with polite suspicion. Stones are moved during churchyard clearances, re-cut, or erected decades after the death they commemorate, and an age given by a grieving relative is not evidence of a birth date. Always match the inscription back to the burial entry, and use the register for the date of burial and the stone for the relationships.

Also look at ledger stones under the floor, wall tablets, and war memorials, and check whether a local family history society has already transcribed the churchyard.

Weighing the Contradictions

When sources disagree, you need a rule for choosing. A workable order of preference:

• An original register entry beats any transcript or index.
• A record made near the event beats one made long afterwards.
• A record made by someone with knowledge of the person beats hearsay.
• Two independent sources agreeing beat one source alone.

Then build a timeline on paper. A burial giving an age of 74 sets an approximate birth year; a baptism four days before a burial tells you about infant mortality rather than a long life; a couple's first child usually arrives within a couple of years of marriage. When the arithmetic refuses to work, suspect the informant, the clerk's memory, or a second family of the same name in the next parish.

Beyond the Registers: The Wider Parish Chest

Once you have a rough family outline, the parish chest gives you flesh. Settlement examinations and removal orders explain why a family left. Overseers' accounts, apprenticeship indentures and bastardy bonds name the poor, who often escape other records. Tithe awards and churchwardens' accounts place people in specific fields and pews.

Do not forget nonconformity. Methodism ran deep in Cornwall and parts of Somerset, and Quaker registers survive in strength. A baptism missing from the parish register may sit in a chapel book a mile away.

Finally, check the county record office catalogue for the parish by name, not just the surname, and read any introductory notes the archivist has written about gaps and peculiarities. Those few lines often save an afternoon of confusion, and they tell you exactly which years to trust.