Created by Julie Goucher, 2021 using Wordscloud

In 1990 I was looking at the parish register for Compton in Surrey. Tucked away in the register was some additional bits of information, I made a few notes and carried on. Fast forward to 2019, I came across my earlier notes and planned to revisit the material.

This additional information was either written on blank pages within the parish register, but sometimes on loose papers. Most of the papers were in date order, but some were not. The vicar of the parish choose to use the register for this additional information which held baptisms, marriages and deaths for the period of 1639-1812. The register is at the Surrey History Centre under reference PSH/COM/1/2 and has been digitised by Ancestry and it was the digitised records that I looked at recently when I looked at what I was going to do with my notes from 1990.

I thought this was worth sharing, especially as some relates to the early 19th Century census which broadly speaking has few examples that are known to have survived, and for those that have survived there is restricted data available. I pulled the census material together for a quick series of posts, Census, People and Genealogy which will be published in January. (I had planned for December, but got a little side tracked by something else!), but there was more….

In the same register was other interesting sets of materials:

• Several lists of those vaccinated for Cowpox in Compton from 1810
• A list of those that were Confirmed at Godalming in 1821
• Several lists of those Confirmed at Godalming, various dates post 1821
• A note about the building of a school room at Compton in 1840
• A small note about the gallery in Compton Church in 1842
• List of Compton Charities
• Details of a sermon given at Compton Church 1843
• A note about the Chancel at Compton Church 1859
• Details about the roof of the Church at Compton 1869
• A small list of those from Compton confirmed at Puttenham (Surrey) in 1869 (an earlier confirmation by the Bishop of Winchester was deemed invalid)
• A narrative about the murder of Joseph Hollis which took place in 1809 in Compton
• A pedigree of Fullam family – those that had events that occurred in Compton were identified and with page numbers given. This identified that there were two vicars from the same family, one of which was vicar for 55 years – illustrated below.

Compton Parish Register – Surrey History Centre, Woking, Surrey  PSH/COM/1/2  accessed via Ancestry

This illustrates how fascinating our parish registers are and how their remit may well go far and wide beyond the recording of births, marriages and deaths. Have you found other material in parish records you have looked at?