St Leonard’s Parish Registers

St Leonard’s has a very good collection of parish registers, dating from 1548. We are also fortunate in that there is a transcription of the earliest registers, from 1548 to about 1781 made by F. M. Barrell, dated July 1972. What makes this set particularly interesting is the supplementary commentary written contemporaneously into many of the individual records and subsequently copied into the transcript.

This practice was started by Firmyne Adams, priest at St Leonard’s from 1578 to c. 1613. He was entrusted in 1598 with copying the earlier records onto parchment (“in a beautiful Elizabethan hand”). He decided to supplement them and the ongoing records with local history and commentary.

These supplementary notes have been described by previous writers such as the Revd. J.V. Bullard in his 1902 publication “Flamstead, its Church and History” and have often been re-published. Some examples are shown below.

Since 1978 (under the Parochial Registers and Records Measure), all the original registers have been stored at Hertfordshire Archive and Local Studies (HALS) in Hertford.

The table shows the date ranges of the registers held by HALS and those of the transcripts digitised and posted on this site.

Many of the St Leonard’s registers have now been digitised, processed and uploaded to database services such as findmypast.co.uk or ancestry.com, mainly for paid access by family history researchers. These databases do not contain the supplementary notes. However, there is a scan of the Barrell transcripts on findmypast.

Before that, many of them had already been copied using the technology of the time. The Revd. Cecil Russell reported in a Village Scrapbook entry dated 1940.

“The Registers up to 1811 have been micro-filmed and in the event of the originals being damaged or destroyed by enemy action application should be made to the Society of Genealogists, Malet Place.”

Parish Registers in England

In 1538, Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister to King Henry VIII, introduced registers to England, obliging each parish in the new Church of England to keep records of baptisms, marriages and burials. The aim was to provide central government with data about the population.

King Edward VI fully implemented the system and, in 1597, Queen Elizabeth I improved it by specifying that parchment books had to be used. All paper records dating from the beginning of her reign in 1558 were to be copied. In addition, churchwardens were instructed to make copies of all registrations and send them to the bishop. These copies, known as “Bishops Transcripts”, were designed to prevent fraudulent alterations of the parish records, e.g. to legitimise a child or alter inheritance rights.

The system applied only to the Church of England and did not apply to other religions or denominations such as Roman Catholics and “non-conformist” Protestants.

Record keeping was often patchy, with the amount of detail variable, although it became more standardised over time. In 1754, separate standardised banns and marriages registers were introduced. In 1837, civil registration started for births, marriages and deaths, and so parish records became less important.

Thus, today we have just a few original records surviving from 1538 to 1558, copies of registers from 1558 to 1597, and original registers thereafter. Many are missing from the Civil War and Commonwealth Period between about 1642 and 1660.

Such registers were hand-written, with varying legibility and spelling, initially in Latin, and with the potential for errors whenever they were copied. There is further potential for error when transcribing them for digitising and uploading into genealogical databases. Local knowledge is very important when making sense of such records and commercial services often lack this.

Examples from the St Leonard’s Registers