How the project came about

I was born and brought up in Ireland (Rathfarnham Parish), but have lived abroad since leaving school nearly 40 years ago, mainly in England but also for short periods in Germany and France. I have been interested in tracing my family history since getting married and having children, but I wanted to do more than just consult the records, such as parish registers. I wanted to give something back.

It all started with an overgrown churchyard (Longcross) in Surrey, England in 1990. I decided to do something about it and enlisted the help of other parishioners to remove brambles and rhododendron that were obscuring many of the gravestones. As we cleared away the vegetation, more and more memorials appeared and I decided to record and map them, so that the genealogical information on them would be protected against future advances of undergrowth, accidental or deliberate damage and weathering.

I then thought it would be useful to compare the newly discovered gravestones with the burial register. This was initially just to help with deciphering faint inscriptions but it eventually developed into an attempt to produce an all–encompassing record of the parish from its creation in 1847, by including baptisms, marriages, banns of marriages, burials and monumental inscriptions, with an alphabetical index.

And so the project was born. I quickly developed my transcription rules and presentation format, both of which have remained almost unchanged since I started. But I needed a name for this new enterprise, so I decided on the rather grandiose title of ‘The Anglican Record Project’ with the equally ambitious strapline:

‘the transcription and indexing of registers and other documents/sources of genealogical interest of Anglican parishes in the British Isles‘.

That left me a pretty wide field in which to operate! For practical reasons, I also subsequently separated the recording of monumental inscriptions from the transcription of registers. And the start and end dates of each transcript were dictated either by the dates of the original registers or by the amount of free time I had to consult them! Since then I have produced a further 28 volumes of register transcripts of both Irish and English parishes.  They cover either:

1. my local parish (in England);
2. parishes that feature in my family tree or;
3. random items that I come across in record repositories – more of which later.

I have also recorded the monumental inscriptions of a further nine churchyards, mainly in Cornwall and Wiltshire. I provide copies of my work to the local incumbent and relevant record offices and family history societies, as well as the Society of Genealogists in London and the Representative Church Body Library (for Irish parishes).

And why do I do it? There are four fundamental reasons: it makes the genealogical data more widely available; it also makes it more easily accessible; it protects the original registers from excessive handling and it preserves the information should the registers be damaged or destroyed. A motivational clue is to be found in the last verse of Psalm 100 ‘Jubilate Deo’.

Mark Williams
E–mail: williamsfamilycrookham@btinternet.com

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