Here, FreeREG volunteer Ian Slater gives some background to a notable marriage record he transcribed; that of American composer Arthur H. Bird.

Arthur Homer Bird was an American composer, for many years resident in Germany. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied in Europe and spent a year at Weimar with Franz Liszt. He composed a symphony, Karnevalszene; three orchestral suites; some works for wind instruments alone; some music for the ballet; a comic opera; and some chamber music. Bird died in Berlin in 1923. 
(credit - https://musopen.org/composer/arthur-h-bird/)

A report in a Brighton newspaper from 1889 regarding a local lecture of 19th century composers states "Probably very few English musicians know anything of the American composers, Arthur Bird and E.A. MacDowell, who both received great praise". I am sure that the same can be said today nearly 130 years later. Arthur Homer Bird was born July 23, 1856 in Watertown, Mass. U.S.A. to Horace Bird (a well-known musician in the neighbourhood of Boston, where his singing schools were very popular) and Elizabeth (nee Homer). The 1860 and 1870 US Censuses show him at home with his parents and siblings(8 in 1860 and 5 siblings in 1870). His passport application in October 1874 lists Arthur as aged 18 years, 5 feet 10 ins, dark hair with light hazel eyes.

In 1881 Arthur H Bird appears on the Canada Census of 1881 - an Organist from the U.S. aged 30 years residing in Ward no 2 in Halifax City, Nova Scotia.

According to an emergency passport application dated September 1920, Arthur resided in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1878 to 1888, in England from 1888 to 1890 and Germany from 1890 to present (1920). During this time he confirmed that he was in Italy and three times in the US. His purpose for residing in Germany was "studying art and music on behalf of Etude Musical paper (based in Philadelphia) and Musical America (of Chicago)”.

Our interest at FreeREG concerns those few years in England. For no obvious reason the parish church in Peterborough was chosen as the location for his marriage on 29 February 1888 to Wilhelmina Drenker - a 34 year old widow. Interestingly Arthur's 1920 passport application at the American Commission Berlin stated that his wife was born in Hanover on 05 March 1858, just thirty years before their marriage.

Another interesting fact is that in July 1894, Arthur applied for US passports for himself, wife Wilhelmine and 2 minor children, both born in Berlin, Marguerite (born 16 November 1875, some 12 years before this marriage) and Grace (born 14 June 1889, 15 months after the marriage).

There was another passport application dated 9th December 1914 at the American Embassy in Berlin, Germany for Arthur (aged 58 years) and his wife Wilhelmine. He confirms that he left the US on 05 October 1911 and that he lives in Berlin - Dahlem following the occupation of Musician. He states that his previous US passport was issued on 18 July 1894. He adds that he is 5 feet 10 inches and now has grey hair with a white moustache. A section on this application confirms that Arthur intends "to return to the United States within indefinite five months for the purpose of protection and identification". An accompanying letter with the application says that Arthur requires the passport for "residing in Germany and returning to the U.S. by whichever route available".

Arthur returned to the US on three occasions - 1899, 1909 and 1913 and was still in contact with his siblings as in March 1922 he had 3 sisters living in Upland Road, Cambridge, Mass. He was claiming that he was suffering financially. His application to the American Consular Service in Berlin states "I am the sole representative in Germany of the Musical Leader and the Philadelphia Etude both American Musical Magazines. Since the Department authorized the issuance of a certificate of identity for my continued residence in Germany in June 1920, I have not been able to return to the United States because of financial circumstances. However, the Musical Leader has proposed my coming to America this summer, if they will pay my expenses over, I will of course avail myself of the first opportunity to return. I have not at the present time, sufficient money to pay for a Departmental passport and I therefore, respectfully request that a certificate of registration be granted me".

Arthur died the following year in Berlin.

Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. On Saturday 3rd March groups from around the world will create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society.

All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.  Research Data is one of four themes for this year's Open Data Day.

All three of our current projects contain information which is invaluable to family historians and other researchers. The indices to the registrations of death in England and Wales are, of course, freely available on www.freebmd.org.uk. Civil registration only started in 1837, so to find deaths which occurred earlier, you can look on www.freereg.org.uk, to see Church of England and other burials.  Later burials are there too, from the Church of England Registers and a growing range of religious organisations and secular bodies.  Most recently, we have received images of burial registers from Lancashire that are awaiting transcription - sign up here to help get them on line sooner!

Surprisingly, perhaps, the census records we transcribe and share on www.freecen.org.uk also have information about death. On https://freecen1.freecen.org.uk you can search by occupation, and this includes those who worked in various aspects of the businesses surrounding death.  Restricting the search to Cornwall, in 1841 there was just one (funeral) "undertaker" recorded (in St Austell) In 1851, four undertakers are recorded:

In 1861, just one again is recorded, and in 1871 five including Jabez Parkyn.  A decade later, the Parkyn name becomes even more visible, as the children of the family (shown below in the 1871 census) continued the family trade, all three describing themselves as "Builder & Undertaker":

But in 1891, although the number had grown to 11, none of them was a Parkyn.  Jabez senior and Jabez junior (now spelled Parkin) are recorded purely as Builders, Jabez William A had become a painter.

This brief look raises many questions - many undertakers had more than one occupation (carpenter or mason being common).  Were others who were recorded only as masons or carpenters also arranging funerals? We have not yet enabled a search-by-occupation feature on FreeCEN2 - we'd love to know if you would use this feature, and how you would like the search of occupations to work there.

I restricted the data to Cornwall, as we now have permission to share this dataset as Open Data - please contact us to request access to this dataset. Sharing this data as Open means that the history of undertaking in Victorian Cornwall can be undertaken (excuse the pun!) much more easily than for other counties.

Please join us in exploring our records on 3rd March, commenting here or on our Facebook event.  We'd love to know anything you are doing with the data of death - for example if you are researching the Undertaking Parkyns of Cornwall, exploring longevity, or if you would like us to transcribe the records of your church or share the transcriptions from a graveyard survey.

Last month, Frank Rogers described some of the work he does as a transcriber for FreeREG. Here, FreeREG transcriber Cathy Jury exemplifies the need for patience and tenacity when working on some of the more difficult parish registers...

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Years of transcribing tricky Cornish place names and surnames and a knowledge of Latin (plus digital enhancement and lots of patience) are helping me to extract many details from St Kew’s register, which was repaired and rebound in 1868 following severe fire damage.

The 16th / 17th century handwriting in Latin is difficult to read, forenames are Latinised and surnames and place names have varied and archaic spellings. 

An example of the fire damaged register of St. Kew:

Image: Cornwall Record Office P100/1/1 

I’ve been transcribing for about 6 years now and am concentrating on the older 16th-18th century registers. I think it is in this area that FreeREG offers a real help to its users, because these pages can look like an unintelligible mess to the inexperienced.

These St. Kew records are now finished and all searchable using the FreeREG search tools. Researchers can use them to locate a possible family member in this seemingly illegible register and even discover which Cornish village or farm they lived in.

Finally of course, we are contributing to an amazing voluntary effort to provide searchable parish records for free and for all.

by Cathy Jury, FreeREG transcriber

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Do you have some local knowledge and/or Latin (even a rusty O Level!)?

FreeREG has images of various difficulty levels, so if you'd like to transcribe but don't feel up to this type of register, still get in touch; we can start you on something you feel comfortable with.

Helen Barrell - FreeREG transcriber and writer of historical crime fiction and non-fiction describes how she uncovered records pertaining to the 'Witchfinder General' in the parish registers of Essex and Suffolk.

One of the biggest witch-hunts in English history began in the village of Mistley in north-east Essex in 1644. When I began to transcribe Mistley’s parish register covering that period, I expected to find the names of those caught up in the panic. But the register unlocked clues as to the power structures in the area that helped to bring Matthew Hopkins, self-styled Witchfinder General, to prominence.

After three years of inducing terror and extracting false confessions under duress, Hopkins died and was buried in Mistley, on 12 August 1647. A note in the register tells us that he was the son of Mr James Hopkins, Minister of Wenham – about eight miles away from Mistley, over the border in Suffolk.

(Courtesy of Essex Archives Online. D/P 343/1/1)

The reason for Hopkins being in Mistley had been shrouded in mystery. What brought him there from Suffolk? Why was he buried in the place where he started his witch-hunt?

As I was transcribing the register, picking up every name as I worked my way through it, I wondered if there were any other people called Hopkins in the register – did Hopkins have any family who had travelled to Mistley with him?

This led me to the burial in 1641 of John Hopkins, with the handy note “son of Marie Hopkins (wife to Mr. Tho. Witham, parson).” So there we have our explanation for why Matthew Hopkins was in Mistley – his mother had married the vicar, after the death of his father in 1634. And John Witham, who performed Hopkins’ burial, was his stepbrother.

I wondered if the family of Thomas Witham could shed any light on Hopkins. Witham was inducted into Mistley’s church in 1610, when at once - and I’m sure other transcribers will recognise my joy at this - his beautiful, clear handwriting appears in the register. He kept the records neatly for over thirty years, carefully numbering each entry. He was fond of adding a distinctive trefoil design with a long tail, and whenever a record related to someone in his family, he often wrote the name twice the size of everyone else’s.

(Courtesy of Essex Archives Online. D/P 343/1/)

From 1613 until 1629, the baptisms of seven children of Thomas and his wife were recorded in Mistley’s parish register. His wife was named Free-gift, a presumably Puritan name, perhaps an Anglicised version of “Dorothy”, which means “Gift of God”. She died in 1633. 

Between 1630 and 1639, four brides with the maiden name “Witham” married at Mistley. Two of them, Marie and Dorcas, match up with daughters of Thomas and Free-gift, but two other brides, Anne and Susan Witham, do not. However, when we come to the baptism of Susan’s children by her husband Richard Edwards, the names are written in the same large writing that Thomas Witham used for his family. So it seems likely that Susan, and perhaps Anne too, were also children of Thomas and Free-gift, perhaps born before Thomas became Mistley’s vicar.

This is important to note, because it was the death of one of the Edwards’ children which helped to spark off the witch panic. Richard was an extremely important man in north-east Essex, a wealthy landowner who was also chief constable of the Tendring Hundred - the area where Mistley lies. By 1643, Thomas Witham had gone to London to preach, leaving his church vacant. It seems that Matthew Hopkins, as son and stepson of clergymen, had influence, as would Richard Edwards. And if Edwards’ wife was Hopkins’ stepsister, then it was the death of his stepsister’s child, apparently by witchcraft, that set him off on his career as The Witchfinder General. It was perhaps not random rage, but targeted revenge.

But it’s not only in Mistley that we find the Witham family connecting with a prime mover in the witch panic. Bradfield, the parish immediately to the east of Mistley, was the home of Sir Harbottle Grimston, who sounds like a villain in a Dickens’ novel. He was a very important man, and as a Justice of the Peace (along with Sir Thomas Bowes, my great-several times uncle, I’m sorry to say), helped Hopkins in his schemes to prosecute witches.

I’m currently transcribing Bradfield’s earliest register, and came across the Grimston family in the 1500s - Harbottle was baptised there in 1578. Then in the 1620s, familiar handwriting appeared in the register, and I even spotted a stylised trefoil - was this Thomas Witham? But a note in Latin helpfully informed me that one Peter Witham, alumnus of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, became the reverend incumbent of Bradfield in 1628. 

As it’s been a couple of years since I originally transcribed Mistley’s registers, I looked back at my notes and found a snippet from the Alumni Cantabrigiensis, which contains a brief biography of students who studied at the University of Cambridge. Peter Witham and Thomas Witham both appear, and Alum. Cantab. says that they were brothers. To be honest, I could have guessed that from the near-identical handwriting! Although of course, who knows - perhaps Thomas used to pop over the parish border to write up all the baptisms, marriages and burials for his brother in his beautifully neat handwriting? Although the Mistley register has “baptised” and the Bradfield register “baptized” - would one man change his spellings? But, just like Thomas’ habit when recording family events, when Peter’s son was baptised in 1630, the entry was written in larger writing.

(Courtesy of Essex Archives Online. D/P 173/1/1)

During Peter Witham’s incumbency at Bradfield, three records pertaining to Sir Harbottle’s family were entered in the register: three of his grandchildren, none of whom were actually baptised in Bradfield as they were all born in London. They take up half the length of a page, with full details about where they were born, what time of day, and other details - far more information by some way than is included in the entries for the mere ordinary folk of Bradfield.

Considering what I had surmised regarding Matthew Hopkins’ relationship to the Witham family and their involvement in the witch panic, I wondered if here, again, we had evidence of the close-knit networks of power in the area. Peter Witham was stepuncle to The Witchfinder General, and he seems to have been close to Sir Harbottle Grimston, or at least acquainted with him, as the vicar would be with the local gentry. Although Peter Witham left Bradfield in 1633, just before Hopkins would have arrived in Mistley, a connection had been made between the Grimstons and the Withams during his incumbency.

So Matthew Hopkins wasn’t in Mistley by accident. He had lived there since boyhood, and was connected with the most powerful men in the area. It is no surprise, then, that when Civil War came and unrest and panic afflicted the populace, he could rise to prominence as The Witchfinder General.

(Courtesy of Wellcome Images)

Parish register images: courtesy of Essex Archives Online. No further reproduction is allowed images unless with written permission from the Essex Record Office. 

Additional information:

For a fascinating and eminently readable study of Matthew Hopkins, see: Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. London: John Murray, 2005.

Great Wenham’s earliest register hasn’t survived, so no record of Matthew Hopkins’ baptism exists. Thomas and Peter Witham were born in Steeple in Essex, according to Alum. Cantab., but the earliest register for Steeple hasn’t survived either.

Manningtree was part of the parish of Mistley until the late 1600s. Richard Edwards is stated as being of Manningtree on his statements that he gave alleging witchcraft against several local women.

About the Author:

Helen Barrell is a librarian and an author. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Punt PI and her Victorian true crime books Poison Panic and Fatal Evidence are published by Pen & Sword. www.essexandsuffolksurnames.co...