Ancestors of Cley

I had a very pleasant surprise the other day. A visitor to this site, who volunteers for FreeREG, contacted me to tell me that there is a transcription of a marriage record for William Jeary of Stiffkay (sic) and Elizabeth Lane of Binham, both single, by licence on 15 Feb 1738/39 in Baconsthorpe.

Baconsthorpe? I'd never have thought of looking there.* The names (especially the surname "Lane"), home parishes, and dates fit, but I wonder why they married there. I hope to be able to get the licence affidavit, if it still exists, to see if it might answer that question.

But that's for a future post. Right now I want to say thank you to Jean, the FreeREG volunteer who took the time to contact me about a marriage record that's eluded me for months … and I also want to thank the unknown volunteers who are freely giving of their time to transcribe that record and thousands like it.

If you're not familiar with this wonderful resource, here's a brief description from the What is FreeREG page:

Our objective is to provide free Internet searches of baptism, marriage, and burial records, which have been extracted from parish registers and non-conformist church records in the UK. The recording of baptisms, marriages and burials in parish registers began in England in 1538 and is separate and distinct from the civil registration process that began in 1837. (The latter is covered by our companion project FreeBMD) Our aim is to make it easier for researchers, no matter where they are in the world, to locate a specific record relating to their ancestor within a parish register.

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What is possible with FreeREG is for an individual researcher to enter an ancestor's name, specify a search for a baptism, marriage or burial, state a date range to search, state a county, (and optionally, narrow it down to one town or village), and then search the database for the match using those criteria.

Again, my thanks to Jean and her FreeREG colleagues. One final note - a tip for searching that Jean passed along to me: It's best to tick the soundex box for the surname, leave the Christian name field empty, and enter a date range if you expect a lot of hits. This is because transcribers are instructed to transcribe as written, with abbreviations, spelling variants, etc., but there is no soundex on the Christian name search like there is on the surname name search.

Related Posts

1. Not the child we expected to see in the census
2. Citing the source of Norfolk Parish Register images at the FamilySearch Pilot Site
3. Norfolk Parish Register images online!
4. Ruling out Shipdham as the place of William & Elizabeth Jary’s wedding
5. Tombstone Tuesday: Susanna Jary