A Baptist Church in Eccles, Lancashire, 1831-1842
The Register[7]
The original is a book of unlined paper, with numbered pages. It is preceded by three pages of a printed "Certificate or Statement, to accompany Register Books…" The page numbers run 1, 2, 4 to 22. Pages 1, 2 and the next unnumbered page form the certificate, 4–22 form the body of the Register, and one unnumbered page at the end has a handwritten certification signed by three officials of the General Register Office. In the certificate, the Minister states that the church was founded on May 1st 1831, and that he has kept the register since 23rd November 1831. This is the date of the first entry, on page 4. The last page has the word END added by hand under the page number. The book therefore appears to be complete.
The Register records only births, generally giving the date and place of birth, the date and place of a naming ceremony performed by the minister, a list of witnesses to the naming, and sometimes a witness to the birth, which I take to mean a midwife. The exact wording varies through the book and there appears to be no set form. In almost every case, the place of birth has been added above the text, though still in the original handwriting. The number of entries per page varies from one to three. In the following transcript I have assigned numbers and in this paper I will refer to them as [1], [2] etc. There are 24 entries, i.e. 25 children (the last entry being for a pair of twins) born to 13 couples. A complete list of names is given in Table 1.
The register does not appear to have been transcribed before, but part of it was abstracted for the IGI.[8]© Roderick D. Cannon.