Church and Community, Selected records 1540 - 1800 (485)

Enhance your family history experience by considering the places our ancestors lived in the context of the wider community. This course gives you the tools to understand the nature, jurisdictions and administrations under which different types of community existed in the past, and seeks to bring genealogy and local history closer together. Youve found your ancestor in the parish registers, but was that parish rural or urban, a town or borough? How did that affect your ancestors lives and how will it affect your research? We look at the records of towns, such as burgess rolls, and the difficulties and pitfalls in tracing our early ancestors who migrated from rural areas / parishes to towns.

You will learn about the many records of the diocese and its court, including visitation records, marriage licences and probate records. Also in this category are the records of disputes heard in the church or ecclesiastical courts, often know as bawdy courts due to the nature of cases they heard.

Finally, we look at the records of boroughs in detail, including guilds, freemen, voting rights and merchant guilds.

Set book:

There is a set book which accompanies this course. Students are asked to purchase Jonathan Oates, Tracing Your Ancestors Through Local History Records: A Guide for Family Historians (Pen & Sword, 2016) before the course starts.

Reading List:

Students often ask us for recommended additional reading for their courses, that they can look at before the course starts. Here is a suggested book list for this course.