1813 to 1880 Baptism Project Freethorpe All Saints |
Baptisms 1813 to 1880
The parish of Freethorpe lies in eastern Norfolk about
4 miles south of the large village of Acle. Freethorpe is a largely linear
settlement spreading southwards along a lane that, once narrow, has been
upgraded to facility access to the main employer in the area namely the
Sugar Beet processing factory at Cantley. Freethorpe, at the time of this
transcript, would have been an almost totally farming community, the sandy
and workable soils benefiting arable productivity without the need for
heavy machinery. Freethorpe is sited at less than 10 metres above sea
level and grazing marshes commence just a mile to the east and are at
or even below that level at times, a few men would have earned their living
as punt gunners or reed cutters as a result. There are many small parishes
tucked away in this part of the county and Freethorpe covered less than
1,000 acres but was relatively more thickly populated than many. |
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Most parishes are fairly straightforward in their usage of registers, Freethorpe is not one of those places. Between 1813 and May 1818 there was no baptismal register kept by the incumbent, on arriving in the parish his successor compiled as best he could a record of the omitted transactions and these preface the first register. That register is a nonstandard half register, namely 400-entry rather than the normal 800, and it is also not pre-stamped with the sequence number being self-numbered; the manual numbering ceases with entry 277 but is maintained through to the completion of the register in this transcript as an aide to finding entries. It should be noted that there are numbering errors perpetrated by the clerks in the first register and some transactions are incompletely dated. In 1840 a second nonstandard half-register of 400 entries but prenumbered covers the the period from 1840 to 1870. These complete registers are filmed on Microfiche 2 - 4 in the collection of the Norfolk Record Office but superior images are held and available to view on the free web site Familysearch and they were used to compile this transcript which despite the issues above was a relatively straightforward piece to prepare. The register covering 1870 onwards was newly deposited in 2018 & the unfilmed register has been re-transcribed replacing the original data entered from the incomplete BTs. |
Back 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880
Back 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880
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