Just in time for Christmas, Essex Record Office has teamed up with Museumshops.uk to make our publications available to purchase online for the very first time. Many of these publications have been printed in limited numbers and were previously only available from the Essex Record Office Searchroom.
Written and researched by Hilda Grieve and Published in 1959, “The Great Tide” told the story of the county’s relationship to the sea, the meteorological conditions preceding the flood, the events of 31 January and 1 February 1953, and the subsequent rescue, relief, and restoration efforts in meticulous detail, drawn from six years of careful, patient research. It has since been described by the writer Ken Worpole as “one of the great works of twentieth century English social history”.
This title has been out of print for some time, but was re-printed by Essex Record Office in 2020. This seminal work should be on the shelf of any student of modern history
Written by Hilda Grieve in 1954, “Examples of English Handwriting” is an illuminating exploration into the chronology of early English penmanship, drawing from six centuries worth of Essex’s parish records, Examples of English Handwriting reads much like a handbook for the aspiring historian. It is a must have for anyone seeking to read the historic documents that are cared for at ERO and countless other archives. Complete with a variety of visual examples, the work diligently elucidates semantic change, typography, abbreviations, letter strokes, and Anglo-Saxon history.
Hilda Grieve’s precious legacy as a didactic county archivist is captured in this classic work of palaeography, with this 1981 edition merging two of the prior volumes published by the Essex Record Office.
One of our most popular titles is: “Pilgrims and Adventurers”.
“No English county has stronger links with the East Coast states of America than Essex.”
On a now mythical autumnal day in 1620, an English fluyt, designated the “Mayflower”, dropped its anchor on the shores of what is now Massachusetts: its passengers, puritan separatists and adventurous individuals, would disembark onto the foreign soil following the lead of Capt. Christopher Jones, his skeleton crew, imbued with a belief in manifest destiny. Pilgrims & Adventurers explores the foundation of the United States: how the likes of Columbus & Walter Raleigh laid groundwork for a theologically ruptured England to flee in search of a New World. The book charts the initial voyage of the Essex pilgrims to the raising of the early settlements: Plymouth Colony, Providence; the attempted conversion of Indigenous Americans, and conflicting theses of Philo-Theology that would continue to divide the early colonists.
Written & published in 1992 by archivist John Smith, this work is a concise introduction to the hitherto unexplored study of the Essex people on the colonisation of North America.
Julie Miller, a masters student from University of Essex, has taken up a research placement at the Essex Record Office, conducting an exploration into the story of John Farmer and his adventures, particularly in pre-revolutionary America, and has been jointly funded by the Friends of Historic Essex and University of Essex. Julie will be publishing a series of updates from the 12-week project.
In part 7 of this series, we reach the end of John Farmer’s travels.
Just over a year after he came home from his epic American journey in 1715 John Farmer travelled back to America as he had planned.
In a letter held in the journal
collection at the Essex Record Office, dated Virginia 1st June 1716,
he wrote to his wife Mary asking her to pack up her goods and join him in
Philadelphia where they would settle permanently. He instructed her:
‘It is best for thee to send what goods thou shalt bring into
Phyladelphia to Anthony Morris but com in thy self and ye children
by ye way of Maryland excypt you think it best to come in ye
ship with Anthony Morris when he doth return home.’[i]
However for some reason that
didn’t happen. Mary stayed in Saffron Walden, possibly still nursing her sick
daughter Mary Fulbigg or perhaps she had heard that John Farmer was already
sowing the seeds of personal disaster and Mary decided not to put her self and
her children at odds with the wider Quaker community. For what ever reason,
Mary decided not to go to America to join her husband of 17 years and as a
result she never saw him again.
John Farmer had arrived back in
America as the first abolitionist arguments were at their height amongst
Quakers. He had not passed comment in his journal of 1711-14 but must have
witnessed the suffering of slaves in the Caribbean and on the plantations of
Virginia and Maryland. Quakers had been
troubled by the slave question a few times previously[ii]
but had chosen to wait for a common agreement to be felt in the Yearly and
Monthly meetings, almost certainly because the senior Quaker leaders were often
slave owners with significant vested interests.
The dichotomy was that Quakers believed all men were equal under God,
and slave owning certainly didn’t sit well with their philosophy, but they were
not yet ready to make any radical changes.
By early 1717 John Farmer had started
an antagonistic anti-slavery campaign. It’s
not clear what exactly triggered his impassioned fight, but it may possibly
have been as a result of reading or hearing the testimony of seasoned abolitionist
campaigner and fellow Quaker William Southeby.
Southeby had been campaigning since 1696, and in 1714 had taken the
Philadelphia Meeting to task saying, “it
was incumbent on them ‘as leaders of American Quakerism, to take a high moral
position on slavery”.[iii] He insisted Philadelphia did their Christian
duty regarding slavery without waiting for recommendation from other
meetings. The Philadelphia meeting of
June 1716 censured Southeby and forced him to apologise for publishing
unapproved pamphlets. By December 1718 they were warning him of disownment as
he had retracted his apology and published a further paper on the subject.
For John Farmer the fight to stop
Quakers owning slaves wasn’t the first time he had made a challenge against the
status quo. Back in Saffron Walden in
1701 he had infuriated the local mayor and church-wardens for refusing to pay a
combined tax for repairs to the church (which Farmer scathingly called a
steeple-house) and poor relief. He was only prepared to pay for the portion
relating to relief of the poor, and not for church maintenance, arguing he
shouldn’t pay for a roof he didn’t worship under. He wrote letters and
published pamphlets explaining why Quakers should not pay tithes and was so
dogged in his protest that eventually the mayor gave in and accepted a reduced
payment.
The
people of Saffron Walden did inlarge ye poor tax On purpose yt
there might bee thereby mony enough gathered for ye poor & for to repair ye
steeple- house. Thus they put church tax
& poor tax together & called it a rate for ye relief of ye
poor. I was told yt
heretofore ye church wardens of saffron walden had caused a friend
to be excommunicated & imprisoned till death for refusing to pay to their
worship house. Thus they put ye
parrish to charge & their honist neighbour to prison without profit to
themselves. Which troubled the people
& therefore they go no more… When
they demanded ye said tax of mee I could not pay it all because I
know some of it as for their worship house.
I offered to pay my part to ye poor: But ye
overseer would not take it: excypt I would pay ye whole tax.[iv]
In April 1717 Farmer presented
the Nantucket meeting with his pamphlet ‘Epistle
Concerning Negroes’ deriding the Quakers for owning slaves, and it was
received with satisfaction. Unfortunately
the pamphlet has not survived, as far as we know. Obviously emboldened by the
reception he had received in Nantucket, and with his customary fervour, in 1717
John Farmer requested a meeting of Elders and Ministers at the June Yearly
meeting in Newport Rhode Island which took place on 4th June 1717 and
there he presented them with two documents, one his ‘Epistle Concerning Negroes’, the other his criticism of ‘Casting Lotts’ (gambling) and his
opinions were not well received by the audience there. They felt he was
undermining unity and stirring up division which was unacceptable. As a result
Farmer was disciplined for refusing to surrender his pamphlets and continuing
to campaign. Records from the time report twenty Friends laboured with him overnight
to encourage him to set aside his views.
But he would not and the following morning they refused him access to
meetings until he was prepared to back down which he never did. [v]
Minutes of the 1717 Newport
Yearly meeting quietly record their decision on the subject of importing and
keeping slaves as being to “wait for the
wisdom of God how to discharge themselves in that weighty affair” but also
that merchants should write to their “correspondents
in the Islands to discourage them from sending anymore.” They would review
it again at the 1718 meeting. That was
as far as they were prepared to go.[vi]
The Friends of Philadelphia found
it necessary to take subsequent action in the matter because John Farmer was
undeterred and continued to disturb meetings, shouting over ministers and
making a general nuisance of himself. He appealed to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
in July 1718, but the Yearly Meeting felt no good would come from listening to
his complaints, and that he could not be received in unity until he had
accepted his writings were unacceptable. When he refused to condemn his own
work he was disowned. This seemingly harsh action by the Philadelphia Quakers appears
to have been a matter of some embarrassment for years to come. John Farmer had been intemperate in his
language, and impatient for change to be hurried through, but to the gentle
Quakers he employed what was later described witheringly as “Indiscreet Zeal” in the Biographical Sketch published in the
journal The Friend of 1855[vii].
The editor and author John Richardson says that
“his actions might have been suffered to have slept in oblivion if it
were not that Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting have been charged several
times with silencing him, because of his testimony against slavery’. “
Presumably being disowned meant
John Farmer lost access to the network of contacts he normally used to help him
travel. He remained in America, perhaps
too poor, or too ashamed to return to England or perhaps because he was
determined to keep fighting for the anti-slavery cause. The Friend Journal ponders how he may have had more success.
“John Farmer may have rightly, as well as forcibly pled the cause of the slave. If, after doing this, he had left the matter to the great Head of the Church, and whilst proclaiming his truth had endeavoured to cultivate in himself love and good will to those who differed from him, he … would have done more towards advancing the cause dear to his heart than could have been effected by denunciation or irritating language.”[viii]
Farmer is recorded as being
located in and around Philadelphia for the remainder of his life, holding small
meetings of like-minded friends whenever he could and presumably continuing in
his trade as a wool comber. He died in
Germantown near Philadelphia in late 1724 or early 1725 at the age of about 57,
having never made it back home to his family. In his will, written in August
1724, he left all his British possessions to his wife Mary, and his American
possessions to his daughter Ann. He left
instructions to the executors that they put:
“no new linen on my dead body, but my worst shirt on it, and my worst
handkerchief on ye head and ye worst drawers or briches on ye body and ye worst
stockings on ye legs & feet. And invite my neighbours to com to my house
& there thirst in moderation with a Barrel of Sider & two gallons of
Rum or other spirit.”[ix]
John Farmer may have been an old
sober-sides, but he made sure he got a decent send off. Probate on the will was granted 11th
January 1724/5.[x]
Thus the story of John Farmer the
Essex Quaker in America, comes to an end.
But in my last post we will look at the extraordinary women in John
Farmer’s life, his daughter Ann, step daughter Mary Fulbigg and especially his wife
Mary Farmer all had a role to play in the wider story of this man and their
stories also deserve to be told.
[i] Letter John Farmer to Mary Farmer dated Virginia
1706. Essex Record Office Cat D/NF 3
addl. A13685 Box 51
[ii]
See my previous post An Essex Quaker in the Caribbean for more information.
[iii]
Quoted in Drake, T.E., Quakers & Slavery in America, Oxford University
Press, London 1950 p. 28
[iv] John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box
51, p.56
[v] New England Yearly Meeting: Committees:
Ministry: Minsters and Elders, 1707-1797. New England Yearly Meeting of Friends
Records (MS 902). Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst
Libraries.
[vi] New England Yearly Meeting: Administrative
Minutes, 1672-1735. New England Yearly Meeting of Friends Records (MS 902).
Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries
While the Essex Record Office might be closed to physical researchers it is still open for remote users via our Essex Archives Online (EAO) service that contains over three-quarters of a million digital images of parish registers, wills and some other records. This service has been up and running since 2011 and in that time researchers from across the globe have made use of the service. And it is a dynamic service as new images are added as and when relevant documents have been deposited and digitized.
In this Blog post EAO user Ian Beckwith has kindly shared some of his research that he has undertaken whilst using our parish register digital images. Ian is a seasoned user of the service and has been using it for several years but if you are new to research and are thinking of possibly taking out a subscription then it is worth considering the wonderful breadth of what is available. So, to begin with Archive Assistant Neil Wiffen discusses how to get started.
During
the 20 years that I have worked at ERO I have been advising researchers on how
to start making use of the digital images that are on EAO and here are some of
my tips.
Firstly, I would strongly recommend that before you take out a subscription you familiarize yourself with the EAO catalogue. It is completely free to search the catalogue as much as you wish. There are several ‘User Guides’ which are located at the bottom of the home page (https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/) so scroll down and have a read of these.
Secondly, have a go at searching the catalogue by trying out a simple search – try typing in the wide white text box (which contains ‘search the archive’) the name of the parish you are interested in and ‘church register’ and click ‘Search’. This will bring up instances of all sorts of registers, not just church, or parish, registers, for a certain place. Some of these won’t have digitized images associated with them so this is why it is essential to check that what you want to look at has digital images before taking out a subscription. It will, however, give you an idea of the range of documents that the ERO looks after. All the Church of England parish registers deposited in the ERO, except for a few of the most recent ones, have been digitized, so you should find that they all have the a picture frame icon at the end of their entry in the search results.
By clicking on the ‘Reference’ or ‘Description’ you will be taken to the full catalogue entry for a document which might well give you further information. You might find that it isn’t really what you’re looking for. But if it is, remember to check for the photo frame icon to find out whether there is a digital image associated with the document .
A quick way to search for parish registers in particular is to look at the ‘Parish Register’ section of EAO (top right-hand corner). Here you will be able to refine your search to the parish you are interested in. If what you are looking for isn’t there (or if it is there but doesn’t have ‘Digital images’ next to it) then don’t take out a subscription. It is worth remembering that not every parish will have records going back to 1538 so do check the catalogue before subscribing to avoid disappointment.
Every
parish has its own unique number assigned to it. Great Burstead, for example,
is D/P 139 and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials come under
D/P 139/1. The first register, which covers 1559 to 1654, is then catalogued as
D/P 139/1/0. Take time to familiarize yourself with the catalogue before taking
out a subscription.
And do bear in mind that even if a parish register survives then early registers have baptisms, marriages and burial scattered throughout them so you will probably need to go hunting through the register for the entry that might be there – or might not . In the Tudor, Stuart and Georgian period it was very much down to the individual incumbent, or his deputy, as to how much effort was put into keeping the registers up to date. Not every vicar, rector or church clerk was as assiduous a record keeper as we might have liked him to have been. Fortunately, if you have a subscription to Ancestry, we have worked together with them to create a name index, which can take a lot of the leg work out your research. You can even buy digital images of what you find directly from Ancestry.
Handwriting
can also be difficult to read, although some incumbents like Rev Thomas Cox in
Broomfield and the famous Essex historian Rev Philip Morant, have beautifully
clear handwriting. Sometimes the writing is faint or illegible and the register
itself might be damaged. Remember these were working documents that have spent
several centuries in damp and cold churches before being deposited at ERO.
One
last thing, if you have identified that there are parish registers that you
want to look though that have digital images associated with them, and you take
out a subscription, then make sure that you take down the reference of what you
have looked at and what you have found as you work your way through them. This
will save time in the long-term and if you share your research with others you
can tell others in what document you found the information.
I
hope I haven’t put you off after all that but I do have one last warning:
historical research can be addictive. You might start out looking for one thing
but get distracted by something else. After 20 years of working at ERO I know
there’s always another new topic of interest just lurking over the page!
Neil Wiffen – Archive Assistant.
If you require any assistance, having taken out a subscription, then you can contact the Duty Archivist at ero.enquiry@essex.gov.uk. While the Record Office is shut, emails are being monitored remotely during the present crisis. Please bear with us though.
Parish Registers – Researching Remotely
I, like many others of my age and with
underlying health conditions, am in self-isolation. But this doesn’t mean that I can’t get on with
research. Thanks to the digital age
there’s so much available on-line for the local historian to work on, e.g.
Essex parish registers, which, thanks to the wonders of the ERO, are at my
finger-tips on my laptop. There’s a subscription
to pay, but once you’re registered., you can log-in, click on ‘Parish
Registers’ in the top bar, scroll down the page until you find ‘Choose a
letter’, then ‘Choose a parish’ and finally ‘Choose a church’. Up will come a table, telling you when your
chosen registers begin, click on ‘View’ in the right hand column, and the
register will appear. You need to know
that in the case of the earliest registers, the baptism, marriage and burial
entries were written up in one book, sometimes in different sections of the
book, sometimes together as they occurred through the year. Later registers record baptisms, marriages
and burials in dedicated volumes. When
the image of your selected register appears, click on the rubric ‘To enhance
this image… ’ and the image will expand to fill the screen. Away you go!
In September 1538, King Henry VIII’s Vicar General, Thomas Cromwell, issued an injunction to every parish priest in England requiring him to keep a record of all baptisms, marriages, and burials in his parish. In Essex at least seventy-five parishes have registers beginning in about 1538. Most of these survivals are copies made in the reign of Elizabeth I, either by the incumbent or the parish clerk, from the old book, which was then apparently discarded.[i] Many other registers begin in the reign of Elizabeth I. Apart from the marriages, baptisms and burials that are the building blocks of family reconstitution, what else can we learn from scrutinising parish registers?
In rural Essex as elsewhere in the
sixteenth century it was taken as a given that God existed. No one’s head was bothered by whether the
earth was the centre of the universe (it obviously was) or whether God was in his
heaven up above while hell was down below (they undoubtedly were).[ii] The only issue was whether God was Protestant
or Catholic. The wrong choice could cost
you your life in this world and your salvation in the next. When it came to making this choice, parishioners
in England had been on something of a roller-coaster ride since 1538. Four years before Cromwell issued his
injunction introducing parish registers the Pope’s authority over the English
Church had been abolished and the King had made himself Supreme Head of the
Church in England. Between 1536 and 1541
the Dissolution of the Monasteries had seen the closure of over 900 monastic
foundations, the dispersal of the monks and nuns who occupied them, and the
sale of their vast landed estates. Yet
the parish registers that survive from this period show that, while these
upheavals were taking place, baptisms, marriages and burials carried on as
normal. The services of the Church
continued to be said in Latin, in the form in which they had been since time immemorial. It was not until 1549, two years after the
death of Henry VIII, that the mass was first said in English. Four years later the Protestant Edward VI was
succeeded by his half-sister the Catholic Mary Tudor, Henry’s daughter by
Catherine of Aragon, and during the next five years England returned to
obedience to Rome, the services in the parish churches reverted to Latin, the
traditional rites and ceremonies were restored, and images and treasures that
had been hidden were brought out again, only for all this to be reversed in
1558 when Elizabeth I came to the throne: again the Pope’s authority over the
English Church was abolished and the Queen was proclaimed Supreme Governor of
the Church.[iii] On May 8th 1559 the Act of
Uniformity, authorising the use of the new Book of Common Prayer, received the
Royal approval. The new prayer book,
which replaced all other service books, came into use on 24th June
1559.
Occasionally, however, in the midst of
the routine recording of rites of passage, the registers provide glimpses of
the impact of these changes at parish level.
In July 1599 the Great Burstead register recorded that
Elizabeth Wattes Widdow sume tyme the wife of Thomas Wattes the blessed marter of god who for his treuth suffered his merterdom in the fyre at Chelmesford the xxij day of may in A[nn]o D[o]m[ini] 1555 in the Reigne of queen mary was buryed the 10 day 1599 so she liued a widow after his death xlviij yeres & fro[m] the 22 of may to the 10 july & made a good end like a good Christian woman in gods name.[iv]
Thomas Watts was one of almost eighty Essex men and women who were burned at the stake in the reign of Mary Tudor for refusing to recant their Protestant beliefs.[v] A full account of Thomas Watts’ martyrdom is provided in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, more correctly titled Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, first published in 1563 and greatly expanded in 1570.[vi]Described as a linen draper of Billericay, then part of the parish of Great Burstead, Thomas Watts had, according to Foxe ‘daily expected to be taken by God’s adversaries’. Accordingly he had assigned his property to his wife and children and donated his stock of cloth to the poor. He was arrested on April 26th 1555 and brought before Lord Rich at Chelmsford, accused of not attending church, i.e. hearing mass. Interrogated by Sir Anthony Browne, who, with Rich, had been appointed to purge Essex of heretics, as to why he had embraced his heretical views, Watts replied that
You taught me and no one more than you. For, in King Edward’s days in open sessions you said the mass was abominable trumpery, earnestly exhorting that none should believe therein, but that our belief should be only in Christ.[vii]
It seems that Watts had also spoken
treasonable words against the Queen’s husband, King Philip.[viii] Unable to persuade Thomas Watts to recant, he
was sent to Bishop Bonner, ‘the bloody bishop,
…’.[ix]
Essex was then within the diocese of London and Edmund Bonner was its bishop,
first under Henry VIII and again under Mary.
He remained staunchly Catholic during the reigns of Edward VI and
Elizabeth. Although usually depicted as
sadistic and merciless, it is worth noting that even Foxe acknowledges that
Bonner made several attempts to persuade Watts (and others) to recant, ‘gave
him several hearings, and, as usual, many arguments with much entreaty, … but
his preaching availed not, and he resorted to his last revenge – that of
condemnation’. ‘I am weary to live in
such idolatry as you would have me live in’, Watts is alleged to have said, and
signed the confession of heresy. Faced
by his refusal, Bishop Bonner had little choice but to consign Thomas Watts to
the secular arm, the Church not being allowed to take life, to suffer the
penalty prescribed by the Statute De
Heretico Comburando (Concerning the Burning of Heretics) of 1401,
originally intended to deal with Lollards.[x]
Returned from the Bishop of London’s
prison to Chelmsford, Thomas Watts was lodged at ‘Mr Scott’s, an inn in
Chelmsford where were Mr Haukes and the rest that came down to their burning,
who all prayed together’. Watts then
withdrew to pray by himself, after which he met his wife and children for the
last time, exhorting them to have no regrets but to glory in the sacrifice he
was making for the sake of Jesus. So
powerful were his words that, it is said, two of his children offered to go to
the stake with him. At the stake, after
he had kissed it, he called out to Lord Rich, who was supervising the
execution: “beware, for you do against your own conscience herein, and without
you repent, the Lord will revenge it”. ‘Thus did this good martyr offer his
body to the fire, in defence of the true gospel of the Saviour’.[xi]
It seems unlikely that Rich, a man whose
name is a byword for cruelty, sadism, dishonesty, ruthlessness and treachery,
possessed a conscience. Born about 1496,
Richard Rich was a lawyer who entered the service of Thomas 1st
Baron Audley of Walden,, who assisted Rich to become MP for Colchester.[xii] In 1533 Rich was knighted and became
Solicitor General. In this capacity, he
used selective quotations from a private conversation with Thomas More in the
Tower in evidence at More’s trial. In
1536 he was appointed Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, charged with
the disposal of former monastic estates, a position that he used to enrich
himself. In 1546 he personally tortured
the Lincolnshire Protestant martyr, Ann Askew, in the Tower. During the reign
of Edward VI, as Lord Chancellor, however, he presented himself as a reformer,
taking part in the trials of Bishops Gardiner and Bonner. Yet in Mary’s reign
he helped restore the old religion, actively persecuting those like Thomas
Watts of Billericay who refused to conform. Under Elizabeth he sat on a
Commission to enquire into grants made during the previous reign and was called
upon to advise on the Queen’s marriage. Richard Rich died on 11th of
June 1558 at Rochford and was buried at Felsted on the 8th of
July. The entry in the Felsted register
gives only the bare facts. For those at Felstead who had dealings with him,
Richard Rich, first baron Rich, must have been terrifying.[xiii]
In Elizabeth’s reign, others submitted to
the Religious Settlement but made their resistance covertly, like the parson of
Great Baddow who recorded the burial of Joan Smythe on May 1st 1572
‘being the purificacion even of o[ur] lady St Mary’ (i.e. the evening preceding
the feastday).
Ian Beckwith
[i] It
is not necessarily clear by whom the registers were kept. Although the entries for the preceding week
were supposed to be read to the congregation at the principal service on
Sunday, there are indications that some were written up at the year’s end (24th
March), possibly from notes on slips of paper.
The penmanship of the entries remains generally of a very high standard
until the last decade of the sixteenth century, when it often becomes slapdash
and much less legible.
[ii] The
realisation that the world was not flat, as the circumnavigation of the globe
by Magellan and Drake demonstrated, did not shake the belief in this
three-decker image of the universe.
[iii] The
change from Supreme Head as Henry VIII was designated, to Supreme Governor, it
has been claimed, reflects the opinion that a woman could not be ‘Head’ of the
Church. However, when Elizabeth was
succeeded by James VI of Scotland, the title ‘Governor’ was retained and
continued to be used by every subsequent monarch, male and female.
[iv] ERO, D/P 139/1/0, Image 49. However, the
length of her widowhood seems to have been miscalculated.
[v] J
E Oxley, The Reformation in Essex to the
Death of Mary, Manchester University Press, 1965, pp.210-237. Coincidentally, my copy was withdrawn from
Billericay Public Library in about 2013.
[vi] I
have drawn upon an edition of 1860, published in Philadelphia. The account of Thomas Watts’ martyrdom is on
p.367. The Book of Martyrs has been
blamed for inciting anti-Catholic sentiment in England.
[x] Several
Essex Lollards were burned at the stake in Henry VIII’s reign. The purpose of burning was to act not just as
a deterrent but also as a purgative, to rid the realm of disease. See David Nicholls, The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation, Past &
Present, Vol 121, Issue 1, November 1988, pp 49-73.
[xii] Thomas
Audley (1488-1544), formerly MP for Colchester, a member of Cardinal Wolsey’s
household, Speaker of the Commons during the Reformation Parliament and Lord
Chancellor of England from 1533-1544
[xiii] Born
about 1496, Richard Rich was a lawyer who entered the service of Thomas Audley,
who assisted him to become MP for Colchester.
In 1533 Rich was knighted and became Solicitor General. In this capacity, he used selective quotations
from a private conversation with Thomas More in the Tower in evidence at More’s
trial. In 1536 he was appointed
Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, charged with the disposal of former
monastic estates, a position that he used to enrich himself. In 1546 he personally tortured the
Lincolnshire Protestant martyr, Ann Askew, in the Tower. During the reign of
Edward VI, as Lord Chancellor, however, he appeared as a reformer, taking part
in the trials of Bishops Gardiner and Bonner, yet in Mary’s reign he helped
restore the old religion, actively persecuting those who refused to conform.
Under Elizabeth he sat on a Commission to enquire into grants made during the
previous reign and was called upon to advise on the Queen’s marriage.
We have already introduced you to two of our speakers for jam packed day of talks on the 7th March, our next introduction is for John Miners.
John has many years experience in textiles, starting his career with Samuel Courtauld & Co. Ltd in Essex. He has been involved in the sourcing and supply of historic fabrics for many restoration projects both in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the USA. His background is technical, rather than design based, and he has knowledge of the production techniques used to produce textiles in past centuries, as well as studying the social history aspects involved in the manufacture of fabrics.
In January 2018 he was appointed as Director of the Warner Textile Archive Trading Company Ltd. This archive is a rich design resource documenting the successes and innovation of Warner & Sons from the late 1800s. Owned by the Braintree Museums Trust, this Collection, the second largest archive of publicly owned textiles in the UK, comprises stunning textiles and inspirational paper designs, as well as original printing blocks, photographs and other documentary material.
John will be talking about how the local textile industry moved from the home into factories, changing from wool to silk. He will look at how Samuel Courtauld & Co changed their production methods of silk yarn using various forms of power: from hand to donkey to water to steam, then exploring the move into the production of mourning crape using machinery built to their own designs in their own workshops. In addition the history of the company up until closure in 1982 will be examined, giving information about the changes in technology.
Julie Miller, a masters student from University of Essex, has taken up a research placement at the Essex Record Office, conducting an exploration into the story of John Farmer and his adventures, particularly in pre-revolutionary America, and has been jointly funded by the Friends of Historic Essex and University of Essex. Julie will be publishing a series of updates from the 12-week project.
In May 1713 John Farmer was in Maryland attending the
Western Shore Yearly Meeting of Friends..
“Afterwards I staid som time in Maryland & wrought with my hands at wool combing… While I was here I received fresh orders from Christ to have meetings amongst Indians in order to their convershon to Christ & to go to Virginia & Pensilvaina & ye west Indies in his service.” [i]
Farmer then set out to meet the local
Native American communities properly and having had a good meeting amongst
friends he commented that he had given testimony amongst “Indians and some Chief
Indians and they were glad of it and marvelled that no such thing had been
before offered to them”[ii]
He went on to say an interpreter spoke
Farmer’s testimony and prayer at a meeting “to
which the Indians several times gave their approbation in their way by giving a
sound” [iii].
We can only wonder what form that sound took.
In August 1713 Farmer was at the Mulberry Grove plantation
in Maryland at an evening meeting at George Truit’s house, where they were
joined by a Native American priest, an interpreter and a number of other Native
Americans. Later in the evening they
were joined by the “Indian King” who “spake very good English” and invited
Farmer to visit their settlement. In
September 1713 he had a memorable visit lodging with the “ShuanaIndians” at
Conestoga on
the Susquehanna River, staying in what he described as an “Indian King’s Palace”, where he slept
on “bare [bear] skins on scaffolds before
a good fire, for it was a cold frosty night”[iv]
In September 1713 Farmer was at the Philadelphia yearly meeting where
he told the assembled Friends that he wanted to spend more time with the Native
Americans and he received a Certificate of Unity from the Philadelphia Friends
and received help and translators to hold meetings in Pennsylvania and share
his testimony of the story of Jesus.
Farmer spent six months travelling and preaching with the Native
Americans. On 9th October
1713 there was a
“large meeting amongst Indians nere Brandy Wine River in Chester County in Pennsylvania. Where a honest Swede did well Interpret for mee. It was a large & satisfactory meeting to the Indians & to our friends & to mee at the End. Whereof the Indians said that they were pleased with what they heard in the meeting.”[v]
John Farmer was aware that the Native Americans had
a belief in God and the Devil and a concept of heaven and hell:
“The Indians have a beliuef of God. & that hee hath a son. & that hee is Good. & that the good people when they dy goe to him: & bee alwais in pleasure. But after ye bad people dy they are alwaise in affliction. The Indians also say yt there is a Divel who is bad & ye Author of badness & they are afraid of him.” [vi]
But he reported that much trouble was being caused in the Native
American communities by rum. One man
told him about a dream story he had heard:
“The Indian in a trance had one com to him & bid him goe back & live well & then when hee dyed hee should be amongst thouse Indians who were in pleasure. Hee was asked why then did hee live badly by drinking to much Rum. Hee answered that before white people cam amongst them they were good & kind one to another but now they are becom bad & hard to one a nother that they may have wherewithal to buy Rum.”[vii]
At a meeting on 18th October 1713 at Conestoga, Farmer met up with Philadelphia Friends Hugh Lowden and Andrew Job. At a meeting they convinced the Native Americans there to send one of their sons to Philadelphia to be taught to read and write in order that he could translate and ensure that “the love that hath hitherto been between you and us continuew between our Children and your Children after us, which the Indians assented to” [viii].
Farmer was obviously interested in the Native American’s spiritual
understanding of the world around them and he reported the story of one hunter’s
unearthly encounter:
“Ye sd Indian had bad luck in hunting. At wch hee was troubled & then see a man in white Raiment stand before him. Who asked him why hee was troubled & further said dost thou not know yt there is a great God who ruleth althings & giveth good luck to whome hee please? Do thou live well & teach ye Indians to do so too & then hee will give thee good things. The Indian asked him his name where upon hee gave himselfe ye name of a bird (wch the Indians say is so holy yt hee never tocheth ye ground) & then vanished out of the Indian’s sight.” [ix]
Within the journal I have not found references to Native American
communities resisting or objecting to the conversations with John Farmer in
particular and the Quaker’s in general.
He was not the first Quaker visitor, Thomas Chalkley had been at
Conestoga in 1706 and had a good relationship with a female tribal leader who
he called “an old Empress” who had
dreamed that a friend of William Penn’s would be visiting and had advised her
people to allow them to preach. Thus the foundations had already been laid for
Native Americans to be receptive to the Quaker message. At least initially.[x]
By November 1713 John Farmer was back in Philadelphia where he tallied
up the miles he had travelled since arriving in America and found it to be 5607
miles. It was then time to start
planning for the next part of his journey, to the Caribbean Islands.
And so we leave our intrepid Essex Friend in Philadelphia, waiting for
the ship to take him all the way to Barbados.
[i]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.50
[ii]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.50
[iii]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.50
[iv]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.50
[v]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.55
[vi]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.56
[vii]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.56
[viii]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.55
[ix]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.56
[x]
John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.55
Julie Miller, a masters student from University of Essex, has taken up a research placement at the Essex Record Office, conducting an exploration into the story of John Farmer and his adventures, particularly in pre-revolutionary America, and has been jointly funded by the Friends of Historic Essex and University of Essex. Julie will be publishing a series of updates from the 12-week project.
In this installment we will look at some of the encounters John Farmer had in pre-revolutionary America.
Having returned to Essex in England
from his Irish adventures in May 1711, and not being one to stay in a place for
long, by Autumn 1711 John Farmer was off on his travels again. Before travelling John Farmer’s wife Mary,
step daughter Mary Fulbigg and 10-year-old daughter Ann moved from Colchester
where they had settled in 1708, back to Saffron Walden. John explained further
in his journal:
“I staid at home a little with my wife & helped hur to remove to Saffron Walden. For shee thought it best for hur in my absence to bee there amongst hur relations with hur lame daughter whom she hoped there to help in to busness whereby shee might git hur a living: which shee could not doo at Colchester. But Colchester is ye best place of ye 2 for my wifes nursing & my woolcoming. Whereby wee earned good wages there untill my wife was taken from it by hur daughters sickness & I was taken from it by ye Lords sending mee to Ireland as aforesaid”.[i]
After putting his affairs in
order John Farmer set off from Gravesend on 1st November 1711 on a
ship called the Thomas of London, captained by Master Benjamin Jerrum. The voyage was uneventful, and John Farmer
was allowed to hold meetings on board and landed in Maryland at the beginning
of March 1711/12 having spent 4 months at sea.
Having been met of the ship by well-known Quaker Richard Johns Senior,
John Farmer stayed with Mr Johns at his house ‘Clifts’, in Calvert County while
he travelled within Maryland, and held several meetings along the Western Shore
before travelling on to Virginia where he held a further eighteen
meetings.
In Virginia Farmer
was troubled by reports that local Quakers had been imprisoned for refusing to
help build garrisons or fortifications. This
reluctance was due to a key principle of the Quaker movement, the Peace
Testimony declared by founder George Fox in 1660, which was a vow of pacifism
that endures to this day.[ii] Quakers refused to have any part in building
fortifications and rejected all weapons of war. Farmer recounted stories of the
harm done by the local Native American people to settlers who had been
persuaded to take up arms, and the Quakers saved by tribespeople when they held
no weapons:
“For I have been cridditably Informed yt som friends hereaway for severall years (in obedience to Christ) have refused to make use of Garrisons & carnall weapons for their defence against Indians: & have Insteed thereof made use of faith in God & prayer to God: & hee hath saved them from beeing destroyed by Indians …who did destroy their neighbours who did use weapons, particularly one man whom his neighbours perswaded to carry a gun, but the Indians seeing him with a gun shot him deadly and they afterwards said that it was his carrying a gun that caused them to kill him which otherwise they would not have done.”
Moving on to North Carolina John Farmer was
troubled to hear of a recent massacre 20 miles away and reported in his journal
that he heard a Quaker had forcibly taken land from the local native Americans,
“whereas hee might have bought his land for
an iron pottage pot.”
Native American communities
had suffered considerably at the hands of the new settlers who raided the
villages and kidnapped the people to be sold into slavery and stole land. The
tribes had also suffered substantial population decline after exposure to the infectious
diseases endemic to Europeans. As a result, under the leadership of
Chief Hancock, the southern Tuscarora allied with the Pamlico, the Cothechney,
Coree, Woccon, Mattamuskeet and other tribes to attack the settlers in a series
of coordinated strikes that took place in Bath County, North Carolina on 22nd
September 1711 and which heralded the start of the Tuscarora War that lasted
until 1715. [iii]
John Farmer described the suffering of that Quaker
family in the Bath County Massacre though it is clear where he felt the fault
lay.
“These Indians haveing been much wronged by English French & pallitins did at last come sudenly upon ym & kiled & took prisoners, as i was told 170 of them & plundered & burnt their houses. Amongst the rest ye said Friend was kiled as he lay sick in his bedd & his wife & 2 young children wer caried away captive & Induered much hardship. But upon a peace made with ye Indians they were delivered & returned to Pensilvania.” [iv]
Travelling back to Virginia and
then Maryland John Farmer attended the 1711 Yearly Meeting at West River on the
Western Shore of Maryland but there he contracted ‘ague & feavor’ which made him too ill to travel for four weeks
and began what he called a “sickly time
for mee and others”. This was almost
certainly Malaria which was endemic at the time. Eventually he recovered, and
travelled on to New York, Rhode Island and Nantucket Island before arriving in
Dover, New England. He was not specific about the date, but it was sometime in
1712. Farmer recorded that he held many
meetings amongst Friends and others “notwithstanding
the danger from the Indian Wars which had long been destructive in this part of
New England.”[v]
In the winter of 1712 Farmer was
in Rhode Island where he nearly died after being injured in a fall from his
horse. But by May 1713 he was recovered
enough to attend meetings at Long Island, East and West Jersey and back to
Maryland where he spent some time working at wool combing again, presumably to
increase his depleted funds.
It was here that “I received fresh orders from Christ to have
meetings amongst Indians in order to their conversation to Christ and to go to
Virginia and Pensilvania and the West Indies in his service”.[vi]And thus the next year’s travel was
planned.
And that is where we can leave
John Farmer, planning his first expedition to take the Quaker message to the Native
American people. And those encounters
will make up the content of the next article.
[i] John Farmer Journal, Essex Record Office A13685, Box 51, p.44
[ii]
To George Fox, this principle served a two-fold purpose, as a protest against
the horrors of the English Civil Wars, and to try to mitigate the opportunity
for violence to be done to Quakers, if they were perceived as peaceful, if
rather disruptive, themselves. For more
information see M Rediker, The Fearless
Benjamin Lay, 2017, Verso, London Ch 1, p.19
[iii]
The Tuscarora War was fought in North Carolina from September 1711 until February 1715 between the British, Dutch, and German settlers and the Tuscarora Native Americans. The Europeans enlisted the Yamasee and Cherokee as
Indian allies against the Tuscarora, who had amassed several allies themselves.
Principal targets were the planters along the Roanoke, Neuse, and Trent
rivers and the city of Bath. They mounted their first attacks on 22nd
September 1711 and killed hundreds of settlers. One witness, a prisoner of the
Tuscarora, recounted stories of women impaled on stakes, more than 80 infants
slaughtered, and more than 130 settlers killed. The militia and approximately
500 Yamasee marched into Tuscarora territory and killed nearly 800, and after a
second assault on the main village, King Hancock, the Tuscarora chief, signed a
treaty. After a treaty violation by the English, war erupted again. The militia and about 1,000 Indian allies
travelled into Tuscarora territory. Approximately 400 Tuscarora were sold into
slavery. The remaining Tuscarora fled
northward and joined the Iroquois League as the Sixth Nation.
After a lot of work we are finally able to announce that the Essex Record Office, working alongside Ancestry.com have launched a new searchable index of the Essex parish registers. Searching for your Essex ancestors is now easier than ever!
In celebration of our new partnership with Ancestry.com, Edward Harris, Customer Service Team Lead, takes a look at some of the stories found in the pages of our parish registers. Read on for more information about what we have been working on with Ancestry.com.
The Parish Registers of England, containing as they do the records of baptisms, marriages and burials made by the Church of England are frequently the start and the backbone of a genealogist’s journey into family history. Prior to 1837 and the start of civil registration, they are essential for family history. Unfortunately they are all too often the end of that journey. When the next link cannot be made or one elusive great, great, great, great grandparent fails to materialise, it is usually normally the pages of a parish register that we are gazing at.
Despite the frustrations so many of us hardy researchers are well aware of, it cannot have escaped our notice that within this great national collection there are a countless stories. These stories provide snippets of the joys and sorrows of everyone, whether normal or extraordinary. They can be better than any soap opera but always tantalising because of what they often don’t tell us and the questions they can’t answer for us. We decided to take a retrospective look at some of the stories we have unearthed over the years at the Essex Record Office where a helpful curate or vicar has decided to provide us with a few extra snippits of information.
The parish burial register for St Mary the Virgin in Hatfield Broad Oak includes in its pages the sad and untimely death of 5 year old Betsy Rogers burnt to death, and two extraordinary marginal notes on that page give a clue as to how:
Feb.y 7. A frost of 7 weeks broke up today. Temperature 12° below freezing point! Many persons frozen to death. One at Gt Canfield, one at Sawbridgeworth.
The seat of Lord Rendlesham (Rendlesham Hall, Suffolk) burnt to the ground, damage = 100,000£; The seat of Lord Sandwich (Hinchinbroke, Huntingdonshire) also destroyed by fire with title deeds, fine pictures, etc.; The Argyle Rooms, Regent St, London also destroyed by fire. Lyceam also…All in Jan.y in Feb.y arising from the unusual heating of flues etc. in consequence of the uncommon severity of the season.
The register for Little Clacton contains a very sad and somewhat mysterious story dating from 1592, when a bride, Prudence Lambert, hanged herself the morning after her wedding to Clement Fenn.
Clement Fenn singleman, and Prudence the late wife of Nycholas Lambert, wch dwelt in Little Clacton Lodge; were maryed uppon Teusdaye [six], the xvth day of August; but the (most accursed creature), did the verye next morning, desperatelie hang her selfe, to the intolerable grieffe of her new maryed husband, and the dreadfull horror and astonishment of all the countrye.
Prudence’s burial is recorded two days later in the same register.
Prudence Fen, now the wife of Clem[e]nt Fen, and late the wife of the above named Nicholas Lambert; was buried out of the compas of Christian burial; in ye furthest syde of the churchyard northward; uppon the xviith daye of August; for that shee most accursedlie hanged her selfe.
A slightly happier story is found in the parish register from Ugley (one of Essex’s more esoteric place names) in 1759 which records the baptism of:
Anne daughter of John Grimshaw, a Sailor in the Dreadnought Man of War, & Jane his wife found in Labour in the Road, & taken care of by the Parish, was born June 27th & baptized July 7th
From these stories of life and death, to the sort of story that leaves family historians pulling out their hair in frustration.
In 1862 the baptism register for St Mary Magdalene in Harlow recorded the reason for its early closure. The registers had been removed from the church by the curate Revd William Raymond Scott who took them to Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands). The curate had travelled to accompany the new Bishop of Honolulu to the island, but also to chaperone 70 young women destined for a life in Australia.
The registers would survive a mutiny, make a brief stop at the Falkland islands and Australia before reaching Hawaii. Fortunately the registers did return to the church 2 years after leaving these shores and so are still available to researchers.
Fortunately, provided the register in question isn’t on a voyage around the world, searching the Essex parish registers is now easier than ever!
Since 2011, the Record Office’s service Essex Archives Online (www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk) has been making Church of England parish registers – and some other documents – available as digital images. Off-site, this works as a subscription scheme, offering various lengths of subscription between 1 day and 1 year. Some documents on the system, such as wills, come with their own name indexes, but the parish registers do not. Subscribers looking for a particular baptism, marriage or burial have often had to work through a whole parish year by year.
The ERO has now teamed up with Ancestry, the world’s largest online commercial family history website, to offer a new way to access the data. Ancestry have created a name index to the parish register images, and Ancestry users can click straight through from the index to Essex Archives Online in order to buy a copy of the indexed image. Images are emailed out automatically on payment; each one costs £2.99 including VAT.
Essex Archives Online expands as new registers are deposited, but currently it holds about 600,000 images of Anglican parish registers deposited either in the ERO itself or in Waltham Forest Archives. The registers cover the whole of the present county of Essex, including Southend and Thurrock – and also including parts of north-east London that used to be in Essex. Depending on the parish and the event in question, they cover the whole period from 1538 almost up to the present day. Ancestry’s new index covers all the baptisms up to 100 years ago; all the marriages up to 84 years ago; and all deposited burial registers, whatever their date.
For those with large family trees to discover the subscription option is still available, but for anyone who needs an image now and again the new system is easier, quicker and cheaper!
Digital images of the admission registers of the Essex Industrial School and Home for Destitute Boys for 1872-1914 are now available on our online subscription service, Essex Ancestors.
The Essex Industrial School and Home for Destitute Boys gave boys a basic education, and training in practical skills such as shoemaking and carpentry
The school’s admission registers sometimes include incredible detail about the boys who were admitted to the school
We have written before about the fascinating history of the Essex Industrial School, which opened in 1872 in two converted houses in Great Baddow. It was a charitable institution founded by local business man Joseph Brittain Pash, and provided accommodation, a basic education, and practical training for destitute boys, especially orphans or those considered to be at risk of falling into crime. By 1876 the school had grown to fill three houses and four cottages, and in 1879 it moved to a new purpose-built building in Rainsford End, Chelmsford, with space for 150 pupils.
The images which have now been added to Essex Ancestors include admission records for about 1,200 boys who were admitted to the school over this period. Individual records include the reasons for the boy’s admission, and sometimes record information about their progress and what happened to them after they left the school. (Sometimes, as in the case of William Swainston, who emigrated to Canada, it can be possible to find out quite a bit about what happened to the boys after they left.)
These records, especially when combined with information from birth, marriage and death records, census records, and newspapers, can provide some incredibly detailed information about the lives of the boys at the school, and their stories often read like Dickensian novels.
Charles Bartlett, for example, was 12 years old when he was admitted to the school on 3rd November 1874.
Photograph of Charles Bartlett on his admission to the Essex Industrial School (D/Q 40/153)
Charles Bartlett’s page in the Essex Industrial School admission registers (D/Q 40/1)
He had been sent by the Waltham Abbey magistrates, where he had twice been brought before the bench for sleeping rough, once in a water closet, and once in a shed. He was sentenced to be detained at the Essex Industrial School for four years.
The details given in Charles’s admission register paint a bleak picture. His father, George Bartlett, was dead. His mother had remarried to Richard Adams. There were three children from the first marriage (including Charles), and five from the second. Richard Adams also died while Charles was at the school. Charles had not received any education and could not read or write. The admission register states that Charles had ‘been systematically illused & neglected, causing him to run away & sleep in sheds’; when admitted he had a deep cut on his hand, apparently caused by his mother throwing a knife at him. (An article found on the British Newspaper Archive from the East London Observer on 7 September 1872 shows that his mother and step-father were hauled before the court after beating Charles so violently that neighbours ran to fetch the police.)
Despite his troubled home life, Charles doesn’t seem to have been pleased to find himself at the school. The register details several occasions where he ran away, only to be returned, sometimes kicking and biting the person who picked him up. On the second occasion he absconded it was thought he had scaled a chimney to escape.
In the end, Charles did remain at the school for his allotted four years. When his time was up in November 1878, he was sent him to his mother at her request. It has been possible to trace him in 1881 in Putney, visiting his mother and her third husband, Charles Munro, and in 1891, living with them in Horley, Surrey. After that the trail has, so far, run cold.
The registers now online are full of stories like Charles’s, and make for fascinating study. The images now available online are from four volumes, with the following catalogue references:
D/Q 40/1 – the earliest admission register, recording boys admitted in 1872-1881
D/Q 40/2 – 1883-1897
D/Q 40/3 – 1897-1911
D/Q 40/4 – 1911-1914 (this volume includes admissions up to 1925, but records after 1914 are closed)
How to view the records
You can see the digital images of the records for free at the ERO Searchroom and at the ERO Archive Access Point in Saffron Walden.
Instructions on how to take out a subscription are available on the Subscription Service page on Essex Archives Online.
Once logged in and subscribed, use the document reference search box in the top right of the screen to search for the reference of the volume you are interested in.
Going further
If you find a name in the admission registers that you want to follow up, you can try to further trace the individual through census and birth, marriage and death records. Sometimes it is also possible to find newspaper articles about individual cases – the British Newspaper Archive online (which you can access for free at ERO and in Essex Libraries) is an invaluable resource here.
You can also see if any further details are given in the school’s discharge registers. These are not available online, but you can visit us to view them for yourself, or contact us on ero.enquiry@essex.gov.uk about remote search and reprographics options.
We have a very exciting announcement today – two ERO staff members will be crossing the pond in the summer for a flying visit to Boston, to introduce the delights of the ERO to an American audience.
Allyson Lewis, Archivist, and Neil Wiffen, Public Service Team Manager, have over 25 years of ERO experience between them, and have a packed schedule of talks and events for their 5 day trip. You can find out more about this ERO dream team below.
This is where they will be – if you are in the area do pop in to see them! Drop in to hear them speak on how to access and use ERO records through our online service Essex Ancestors, and for the opportunity to ask them questions about researching your Essex ancestors.
Monday 3 August, 9.30-4.30
Tracing Your English Ancestors from Essex – event with the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 99-101 Newbury Street, Boston, MA.All the details can be found hereNEHGS was established in 1845 and is a leading resource for genealogists. Its library and archive houses over 28 million items dating back over hundreds of years.
Tuesday 4 August
Neil and Allyson will be speaking at the National Archives in Boston at 1.00pm, and running a family history helpdesk from 2.00pm-.004pm 380 Trapelo Road, Waltham, MA 02452Toll Free: 866-406-2379www.archives.gov/northeastThe National Archives at Boston is part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which has several locations across the USA. The NARA facility in Boston stores approximately 30,000 cubic feet of original records, which date back to 1789.
Wednesday 5 August
Neil and Allyson will be at Boston Public Library with a presentation at 2.00pm and helpdesk until 4.00pmBoston Public Library, 700 Boylston Street, Boston, MA, 02116617-859-2261
Thursday 6 August
Neil and Allyson will be at Boston City Archivesto introduce the staff to Essex AncestorsArchives and Records Management Division, 201 Rivermoor Street, West Roxbury, MA 02132, 617-635-1195; FAX: 617-635-1194
Neil and Allyson will be at the Joseph P. Healey Library at The University of Massachusetts at Boston from 10.00am-12.00noon – more details here
For further information including booking please get in touch with the individual venues. Neil and Allyson look forward to meeting you!
A bit more about Allyson and Neil…
Allyson Lewis is an archivist with 30 years’ experience. She is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford where she read Modern History. She then took a Masters in Archive Administration at University College London. She has worked at Essex Record Office for 12 years and has responsibility for providing Access Points around the county to bring the Record Office closer to the public. She has focussed on researching First World War ancestry as part of the commemorations of the First World War in 2014. Allyson was born in Liverpool but her family come from all parts of the UK and mainly lead back to the Shetland Islands.
Neil Wiffen, Public Service Team Manager of the Essex Record Office, was born in and educated in Chelmsford before undertaking his first degree at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He started working at the ERO in 2000 when the new building was opened. At the University of Essex he completed an MA in Local and Regional History and has a strong interest in the history of the county of Essex sparked off mainly by his Dad telling him tales of watching American bombers taking off from the nearby Boreham Aerodrome. His Wiffen ancestors can be traced back to the Halstead area of Essex to at least 1800 but he is waiting to retire before undertaking his family history proper.
A message for those of you who are users of our online subscription service Essex Ancestors:
Last summer, for the first time since 2011, we raised most of Essex Ancestors’ subscription prices, but we were able to keep the basic 1-day subscription unchanged. We know that our customers appreciated it, but a rise is now essential for us to continue to provide the services that our customers want.
From Monday 8 June 2015 a 1-day subscription will cost £10 including VAT; all our other subscription prices will remain the same. For access to over 750,000 images of parish registers and wills we think that this still represents great value. Essex Ancestors will also remain free to view in the ERO Searchroom in Chelmsford and at the Archive Access Points in Saffron Walden and Harlow.
Don’t forget that our Reprographics Service can email you images of individual documents without subscription, even if the documents appear on Essex Ancestors. The first image of a document costs £2; later images of the same document cost £1.50 each.
Thank you for your ongoing support as we continue to develop Essex Ancestors by uploading ever more content for researchers to use and enjoy.