It is some time since I
submitted a report on the progress of the
Berkshire Overseers' Project but we have been
held up by the delayed move of the Berkshire
Record Office. 22 of the proposed 26 volumes have
been completed. The remaining four volumes will
comprise the 2000 or so documents from Reading St.
Giles and work is already well advanced on the
first of these volumes.
Until recent times the
only access to the results has been by reference
to the five copies of each volume I have prepared
and placed in the BRO, the Society Research
Centre, Reading Reference Library, the Society of
Genealogists' library and another selected
Berkshire Reference Library, usually in the west
of the county. This has now all changed with the
issue of 21 volumes produced by the Society on
microfiche, providing unlimited access to members
everywhere.
Over the years I have
found that many people are unaware, how useful
the overseers' documents can be. As well as the
obvious use of removal orders and settlement
certificates in locating previously unknown
whereabouts of ancestors (where parish register
entries have provided no possible clue), an
examination before the Justices of the Peace can
result in a potted life history of an individual
and their family. The only surviving overseers'
documents from Newbury consist of more than 400
examinations and these have been issued in Volume
26. The examinations reveal that the people
involved came to Newbury from many parts of the
British Isles.
While transcribing
documents for Reading St. Mary in the most recent
volume issued (Volume 21), I came across an
interesting examination for settlement taken
before Harry Austin Deane, Gent., on gth June
1753, who was then Mayor of Reading. The person
involved was a William Stretton (who signed as
Stratton) who had been born in the City of
Limerick, Ireland. In about 1732 he had been
apprenticed for seven years to Benjamin
Barrington of the Parish of St. John's Limerick,
pewterer and founder. He served the full
apprenticeship and afterwards rented two houses,
three outhouses and garden in the Parish of St.
Munchin in Limerick, at a yearly rent
of £13. He paid two years rent for the same and
had not since gained any other legal settlement.
The interesting development was that 'about ifi
years ago [1751-52] he was married by one Thomas,
a Roman Catholic Priest, between Marlborough and
Calne in the Roman Catholic way, but not by the
form established in the Common Prayer Book. The
ceremony was performed in the open field near a
barn'. He further stated that his wife's name was
Sarah Tarrant and that she lived at Lamborn, Berkshire. Is there
somebody who has been unable to locate the
marriage of Sarah Tarrant or Stretton/Stratton?
Even if the couple later legalised their union in
a church in Wiltshire or Berkshire it is highly
unlikely that there would be any indication that
the groom was a pewterer and founder from
Limerick. Is there also anybody in Ireland who is
wondering what happened to William Stretton or
Stratton, who was born and apprenticed in
Limerick in the early eighteenth century and then
disappeared?
There is ample scope for
our strays' co-ordinator amongst these volumes, a
task which I have made easier since I have
indexed each item by personal name, placename and
occupation. Just glancing at the placename index
in this recent volume for Reading St. Mary I see
that there are references to many places in
Berkshire and 32 other counties in England and
Wales, in addition to Ireland, Scotland and
America. There must therefore be members of many
other family history societies who might find
interesting entries in the volumes.
Within Berkshire the
survival of the documents varies hugely parish by
parish, but the lack of any entries for
somebody's particular parish of interest does not
necessarily mean that all is lost. With the
removal orders and settlement certificates, there
were always two parishes involved and copies were
produced for each. The document of the 'other'
parish may have survived. This means that anybody
with Berkshire interests needs to search all the
volumes.
The overseers' documents
also include many relating to bastardy. We all
know that post-1837 birth certificates for
illegitimate children rarely give a father's name.
Unless there is a very helpful vicar, the baptism
registers are also of little assistance. The
ancestry then has to proceed along the mother's
family line. In the bastardy examinations, orders
and bonds the father's name is revealed - which
usually costs him about '40 shillings for the
lying-in and maintenance to date, and then one
shilling and sixpence weekly'. To genealogists
the overseers' volumes may therefore open up a
completely new line of interest - that of the
named father.
It is not possible to
forecast when the last four volumes (all for
Reading St. Giles) will be issued, but now that
the end is in sight it may spur our efforts to
get the task completed. So the whole project,
when the final combined index to all 26 volumes
is completed, will have taken a little over ten
years.
