HARTLIP PARISH RECORDS - No. 1

Most of us walking along the Street in Hartlip or standing in church on Sunday must have wondered about the people who lived here before us. Some of their names on tombstones, in the church porch or inside the church are familiar to us, others are strange. For each of them there are many questions which can be asked. How long did they live, work and worship in Hartlip? What kind of people were they? The same kind of questions which other people in the future will ask about us, as they perhaps make "a joyful noise unto the Lord" on the end of a bellrope or singing in a pew.

The answers to many such questions lie in the written records of the parish. The church registers are the best known and most carefully kept of parish records. All should officially begin in 1538 but the majority, and Hartlip is no exception, were hastily written up by the parish priest in Elizabeth I's reign. Then the Government insisted that he should be able to produce a proper register for inspection and not just a bundle of scraps of paper and parchment on which he had jotted down the baptisms, marriages and burials he had performed. So it is only possible to trace the names and dates of most Anglicans baptized, married and buried in Hartlip from the mid 16th century to the present day.

If one is only interested in compiling a family tree, then the straightforward entry "Godley daughter of Jonas Smith baptized April 11th" in 1611 is quite adequate. Whether she lived up to her name or not does not concern the inquirer. The real fascination of the registers lies in the extra information given by the vicar. The fact that little, "Anne daughter of John Allan" lived at "Yoager" Farm in 1610 and that the village had at least one carpenter in 1614, when Arthur Bennett married Joan Long "maydservant" makes a great deal of difference to the reality of people who lived so long ago. Such additions are rare. The parish priest was a busy man and usually made his official return without such comments.

R.P

(Miss Phillips, teacher-archivist in the County Archives department has been kindly looking through and sorting out our Parish records and we are fortunate in having persuaded her to write some comments. These we intend to print in the form of three arficles. - Editor.)