Cumberland Pacquet BMD
petra.mi...@doctors.org.uk
I am sure like me you are all enjoying Nev’s early Cumberland Pacquet transcriptions.
For the Googlies: Nev is only posting these to the Cumbria List of the Cumbria Family History Society. If you are not subscribed to that list and would like to read them regularly, I suggest you subscribe. Otherwise, you can read them in the Archives. You don’t need to be a member of Cumbria FHS to join the list or read the archives. The list and archives can be accessed here: https://list.cumbriafhs.com/mailman/listinfo/list-cumbria
Long before Nev started posting extracts from the Cumberland Pacquet, I had begun transcribing the BMD columns from that newspaper – but the coverage on the British Newspaper Archive website only starts from 1777 and has quite a few gaps.
These very early BMDs can give vital clues to the family historian, particularly if they contain information not contained in the parish registers, such as relationships or abodes. Unfortunately I found that the newspaper BMDs often lack some standard information that you would hope for – forenames, exact dates and places, ages, etc. etc. So I started looking up the transcribed events in other sources – first and foremost Nev’s wonderful Copeland Registers Index (which is included in the huge names database on the Cumbria FHS website), but also FamilySearch, Ancestry, ScotlandsPeople, Lancashire OPC, any Parish Register Transcripts I have amassed over the years, and occasionally even Wikipedia and Google.
In doing so, I discovered that there are even more inaccuracies in the newspaper BMDs than I had suspected. Dates, when given in the style of “Tuesday se’ennight” or “Saturday last” are not infrequently a week out, or don’t add up to the dates given in other sources. Names of people and places may be spelt in very imaginative ways. Sometimes a completely wrong forename or surname has crept in. The moral of the story is, don’t take anything written in the newspaper as the gospel truth – always corroborate with other sources!
Having said that, other sources can contain mistakes as well. Everything that is an index or transcription can have transcription errors, typos, omissions... Even original Parish Registers themselves are not always 100% accurate.
Nev has kindly agreed for me to post the BMDs in tandem with his transcriptions, starting from January 1777. You will find that I have added corrected or additional information to almost every event. Where there is no additional information from me, it is either because the newspaper already listed as much information as I could find, or I could not find the event in other sources. Not all parishes have been extracted for FamilySearch yet – notable omissions are burials at St. Cuthbert Carlisle and Maryport. And any irregular border marriages of course can’t be checked either as no records exist for the great majority of them.
I hope you enjoy the BMD and find an occasional relative or two.
Petra
Jennifer Trotter
--
Cumberland & Westmorland Newspaper transcriptions are archived here;
http://www.cultrans.com/index.php
See also the related site for historic document transcriptions;
https://sites.google.com/a/cumberland-document.com/cumberland-document-transcriptions/home
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GENEALOGY-CUMBRIA" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to genealogy-cumber...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/genealogy-cumberland/00dd01db6de0%24087886a0%24196993e0%24%40doctors.org.uk.