Thursday, January 22, 2009

Landkey Parish Registers - 22 January 2009

Parish Registers completed up to 1648 and in 1646 and 1647 there were 21 and 20 marriages respectively. Most years there are 3 to 6 marriages. Why all the marriages in those years is an interesting happening. There are now 663 baptisms, 248 marriages, and 544 burials. The incidence of infant mortality is very high and I will pull some of those statistics out. The number of times that more than one sibling is buried very close together is somewhat heartbreaking for the family - oftimes the mother succumbs as well leaving the father with the remaining children. Life was certainly hard in the 1600s.

We went ice skating on the canal (8 km of rink) today for the first time this winter. We probably skated about 4 km in total. It was just around freezing so a very comfortable ice skate and actually a bit too warm! We had our youngest and her fiance over for dinner and that was a lot of fun. We are going to do once a week just to touch base with each other. The time passes very quickly. Although we generally take the dogs for a walk several times a week we do not always see our children so must plan for at least a weekly visit with them.

Other than that I didn't accomplish anything else today. I need to start to work on my presentation and probably I will start that tomorrow. I will need about 25 slides and I actually have all of them prepared but need to update them with new material that I now have plus I want to replace a couple of sections with different families.

1 comment:

Andrew Millard said...

Perhaps the upsurge in marriages was due to the end of the first part of the Civil War. From mid-1646 to mid-1648 was a time of relative peace after four years of conflict.