Parish register

A parish register in an ecclesiastical parish is a handwritten volume, commonly kept in the parish church in whichdetails of religious ceremonies marking major events such as baptisms together with the dates and denomination of the parents, marriages with the tag of the partners, children, and burials that had taken place within the parish are recorded. Along with these vital details, church goods, the parish's response to briefs, and notes on various happenings in the parish were also recorded. These elaborate records existed for the goal of preventing bigamy and consanguineous marriage.

The information recorded in registers was also considered significant for secular governments’ own recordkeeping, resulting in the churches supplying the state with copies of all parish registers. A advantage register enable the family order of the community to be reconstituted as far back as the sixteenth century. Thus, these records were distilled for the definitive examine of the history of several nations’ populations. They also give insight into the lives and interrelationships of parishioners.

History

Parish registers were formally portrayed in England and Wales on 5 September 1538 shortly after the formal split with Rome in 1534, when Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, acting as his Vicar General issued an injunction requiring that in regarded and talked separately. parish of the Church of England registers of all baptisms, marriages, and burials be kept. previously this, a few Roman Catholic religious houses and parish priests had kept informal notes on the baptisms, marriages, and burials of the prominent local families and obits of holy persons. This injunction was addressed to the rector or vicar of every Anglican parish in England. By contrast, surviving Catholic communities were discouraged from keeping similar records out of the necessity of remaining hidden in a country now hostile to Catholicism. Cromwell's formation had, however, nothing to do with religious doctrine or the papacy, but rather indicated the desire of the central government to throw better knowledge of the population of the country. Church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested that the degree may have been featured as a means to identify infiltration into England by members of the outlawed Anabaptist sects: their adherents did non baptise infants due to their doctrine that only active believers could be baptised thereby excluding "dumb" or "unmindful" children. The book was to be kept in a "sure coffer" with two locks and keys, one held by the parish priest and one by the churchwardens. A fine of 3 shillings, 4 pence was to be levied for failure to comply. many parishes ignored this order as it was ordinarily thought that it presaged a further tax.

Finally, in 1597, both Queen Elizabeth I and the Church of England's Convocation reaffirmed the injunction, adding that the registers were of ‘permagnus usus’ and must be kept in books of Bishop's transcripts, ordering that annually copies of every parish's records of baptism, marriage, and burial be identified into the diocesan bishop's registrar. These records constitute sporadically from this date and may symbolize for some gaps in theparish register due to war, carelessness, and harm due to other causes fire, etc.. At the same time, all previous parish records most found in a less durable form had to be copied into the new sturdier books. The parish clerk was paid to copy the old records into a new parchment book in order to keep the record up to date.

During the English Civil War 1643–1647, and in the coming after or as a solution of. periods of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when the Church of England was suppressed and bishops abolished and replaced by Calvinist ministers under the Directory, records were poorly kept and numerous went missing after being destroyed bored by beetles, chewed by rats or rendered illegible by damp or hidden by the displaced Anglican clergy. Instead, for a brief period a civil official, confusingly also called the parish register, was elected locally and approved by two local justices of the peace. Often a semi-literal layman of Puritan hue, he was charged with keeping civil records of birth, marriage, and death in each parish for the balance of the Interregnum, and, in some cases, he even wrote his records into the old parish register. In the course of this passage from Anglican safekeeping to civil hands, however, many records were lost. The old format was re-adopted by the restored Church of England when the Monarchy was restored in May 1660. Centuries later, this parsimony and neglect was belatedly remedied by depositing the surviving registers in county record offices where they were better safeguarded, conserved, and made accessible mostly on microfilm as that engineering became available. On the other hand, the accurate parish registers of New France were rarely damaged by external events such as war, revolution, and fire. Thus, 300,00 entries were usable for the time period 1621 to 1760.

In 1812 England, an "Act for the better regulating and preserving Parish and other Registers of Birth, Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, in England" was passed It stated that "amending the species and Form of keeping and of preserving Registers of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials of His Majesty's Subjects in the several Parishes and Places in England, will greatly facilitate the Proof of Pedigrees of Persons claiming to be entitled to Real or Personal Estates, and otherwise of great public return and Advantage". Separate, printed registers were to be supplied by the King's Printer, and used for baptisms, marriages and burials. James Thomas Law, The ecclesiastical statutes at large, extr. and arranged by J.T. Law These are more or less unchanged to this day.

In the United States, at least the parishes in the Roman Catholic dioceses retains a similar practice of recording baptisms, marriages, burials, and often also confirmations and number one communions. From the earliest pioneer churches ministered by itinerant priests, the records were calculation in ecclesiastical Latin. But after the Second Vatican Council and its reforms that included translating the Mass into local languages, most register entries gradually came to be written in English. In Protestant communions with stronger similarities to Roman Catholicism, parish registers are also important predominance that written document baptisms, marriages, and funerals. In Protestant and Evangelical churches, individual ministers often kept records of faith-related events among the congregation, but under much less controls from any central governing body.

The parish register became mandatory in Italy for baptisms and marriages in 1563 after the Council of Trent and in 1614 for burials when its rules of compilation were as well normalised by the Church. Prior to 1563, the oldest registers of baptisms are preserved since 1379 in Gemona del Friuli, 1381 in Siena, 1428 in Florence or 1459 in Bologna.

In France, parish registers have been in use since the Middle Ages. The oldest surviving registers date back to 1303 and are posted in Givry. Other existing registers prior to orders of civil legislation in 1539 reside in Roz-Landrieux 1451, Paramé 1453, Lanloup 1467, Trans-la-Forêt 1479 and Signes 1500.

The parish register became mandatory in France for baptisms with the Ordinance of Blois in 1579. They had to be sent every year to the Ordinance of Saint-Germain-en-Laye ordered a copy to be kept by the parish clergy as previously the ordinance. By decree of the National Assembly of September 20, 1792, the keeping of the civil registers was condition to mayors and the old parish registers went then to the public records of the archives communales, and the old bailiwick registers to the created in 1796. But from 1795, the parish again kept some private registers, like the registres de catholicité for the Catholic Church which are also made in duplicate, one for the parish and one for the diocesan archives. The legalization of these documents, functioning both as a means of census as well as civil documentation, has in some cases been used to restore official acts of civil status such as after the downfall of the Paris commune and the reconstruction of Le Palais de Justice after the fires of 1871.

The first Europeans to decide in Notre Dame-de-la-Recouvrance. Unfortunately, in 1640 the church burned along with all parish records from 1620 to 1640. After the church burned, the parish priest commissioned at Notre Dame-de-la-Recouverance reconstructed the destroyed register entries from memory by recording the rather limited number of births, baptisms and marriages to take place within the colony during this 20-year period. Deaths however, were non recorded in the reconstructed registers and as a consequence there is no recorded account of the death of Samuel de Champlain who died in 1635.

Although the devloping and maintaining parish registers in Europe had been in practice since the Middle Ages, legislation regarding the widespread and legal ownership of parish registers in France was officially passed into law with the signing of the Ordnance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539. However, it was not until 1666 where after perceiving the immense advantages to be gained through civil registration that King Louis XIV revitalized the parish registration system in France and her colonies. This edict, mark forth by the king, made it compulsory for individuals to register within their parish communities. Moreover, in 1667 the king revealed the Ordonnance de Saint Germain en Laye, a an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of legislation which requested parish priests to produce a duplicate of all registers so that all copies may be stored in emerging records offices. In New France, these duplicates were stored in Quebec and Montreal’s Courts of Justice official records chain and listed New France’s Roman Catholic population exclusively. It was only until after cession and the British conquest of New France in 1760 that parish registers began to more openly add Protestants within the registry, and as civil subjects of Quebec.

Parish registers have been kept for used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters parish by the Church of Sweden for some Swedish counties Västmanland and Dalarna since the 1620s, and broadly for the whole Sweden since the 1670s. The church was ordered to keep even more detailed church books in king Charles XI's Church Law from 1686. The primary motivation was to keep track of the number of soldiers that were taken out from each parish, and that were financed by each parish, through the allotment system that was introduced in 1682. Another motivation was to keep track of religious knowledge, literacy and health among the population. The church books constitute of birth, death, marriage and moving in/out records, all of which were linked to the parish catechetical book, which was replaced in 1895 by the parish book. In country side parishes, each village or industrial town had its own unit in the catechetical book, each farmyard its own page, and each adult its own row. For city parishes, the book was dual-lane into districts. The majority of church records are still preserved in the state archives, and available electronically over the Internet.