Transcribing Parish Registers for North Molton continuing

The Parish Registers continuing into the 1580s contain only the baptisms thus far. I am hopeful that marriages and burials may be hidden somewhere further along. Occasionally I have been lucky to have that happen. No more Pincombe entries at North Molton in the past few years. At the end of 1585 there are now 1123 baptisms, marriages are 144 at the end of 1571 and burials 325 also at the end of 1571. There will be a generation of missing marriages and burials although the priest has, beginning in 1577, entered in the mother's forename which might be helpful in some cases with sorting families. The current priest does not enter the abode of the parents very often and that was helpful with the earlier record keeping.

More new surnames are entering into the parish and some are disappearing (like Pincombe unfortunately). However, the Pincombe family is known to be at North Molton in this time period but they may have attended churches closer to their farms. This would have been the case with the Pincombe family at Filleigh and East Buckland as there were Churches at both of these villages.

I was most pleased that I managed to download all the Indenture/Masters records from the National Archives (79 files in all - most greater than 400 pages) and I am contemplating taking on the preparation of an index for this information (it will be freely available and if I can not give it away then it will be on my website). It will be a long project (probably a couple of years). I shall soon construct the file for entry. It is something I can carry with me if ever we travel. The images that I have glanced at thus far are very good.

I also downloaded the Chelsea Pensions (5 files) but I believe that these are already on the FindMyPast site. I thought they would make interesting reading over time. I am a subscriber to both Ancestry and FindMyPast so will check out their databases and see what they have entered from these files.

I also want to return to transcribing Abbotts Ann now that the days are shortening and somewhat dull by afternoon letting me read readily from the microfiche reader. Now that I have started North Molton though I will complete it first.

I had sent Penton Mewsey and Upper Clatford transcriptions to the OPC Hampshire site earlier in the year but have not yet seen them online.  I did add them to my website though and hopefully they will soon be up on the OPC site.