I'm having a problem at the moment in trying to work out the religious leanings of my great grandparents and their children on my mother's side. It appears that my great grandmother was very much of the Roman Catholic persuasion, but not only married someone who was not a Catholic, she married him in an Anglican church. As I understand it, as a Catholic, if you marry in an Anglican church, the marriage is not recognised as such and you are effectively 'living in sin'. This is not some archaic situation... this is actually how it still works today! If such a marriage were to end with divorce, the Catholic would still be free to marry in a Catholic church, because as far as the Catholic church is concerned, they were never married in the first place! I reckon that my great grandmother must have been overflowing with guilt. My great grandparents had nine children and I have discovered that the first four children were all baptised in the Anglican church. Still searching for possible baptisms of the other five. What I really need to know is whether there is anywhere that holds records of people who have become converts to Roman Catholicism? Has anyone else tried to follow up similar lines of research? I am also interested in hearing accounts of people who have come across family conflict caused by Catholics marrying non-Catholics. This Catholic/non-Catholic dilemma may be partly at the root of some unexplained family fall-outs that seem to be lurking in my own ancestral shadows. My latest research has shown that my great grandfather was baptised at the Catholic church in Tow Law three years before he died in 1914. However, when he died, he was buried in the Anglican church cemetery at Byers Green, Co Durham. His wife, my great grandmother, died some years later and was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Willington, Co Durham, in an unmarked grave at her request! Regards... David Allan.

I have found there was a rift in my ARMSTRONG family as a youngest son became an Anglican minister and he came from a very strong Methodist family. I have been in touch with an Anglican descendant who didn't know anything about the rest of his family as "there seems to have been a major rift in the family as my grandfather was an Anglican clergyman" and his family was never spoken of. This clerygman's oldest brother was a Methodist minister and my great grandfather. Interestingly some of my branch of the family moved from the Methodist to the Anglican church but I think that was a convenience and considered to be of higher social status where they were living at the time - in Cambridgeshire (and important to my grandmother) Here in Victoria, Canada I have found a "split" family - they are connected to my family. Father, an Anglican, is buried in a totally different cemetery. The mother is in the Catholic section of another with three of her children who were technically Catholics are buried in the non Catholic section. The mother died many years before her husband or children so maybe there was no space when the (adult) children died. They are in in the same grave, and all three were unmarried (two sisters and a brother) and lived together, so presumably had bought the plot in advance. Elizabeth Pugh Yukon, Canada