>Audrey writes > >> >Although Bartholomew and his brothers were no doubt brought up as Catholics, some >were married in St Nicholas Church, Liverpool. Gabrielle tells me that this is >Anglican. I suspect that some of the brothers may have married Protestants and that >is why, though you would wonder how they came to do that. > >The possibility of marriage to non-Catholics is very real, particularly as almost >everywhere there were more non-Catholics than Catholics. However, marriage in St. >Nicholas, the Anglican Parish Church of Liverpool was probably more to do with the >civil law than anything else. Before July 1837, the only legal marriages in England >and Wales were ones performed in an Anglican church before an Anglican minister and >the only exceptions were for Quakers and Jews. Some Catholics would have been married >in the Anglican church and in the Catholic chapel as well. I have some who were >married in St. John (Parish Church) in Preston on one day and then in the Catholic >chapel on the next. There were Catholic chapels in Liverpool at the time that >Bartholomew would have been of marriageable age and almost certainly the same >practices will have occurred. However, the marriage registers do not exist around >1800. The earliest is for St. Peter, Seel Street, which starts in 1812, and then for >St. Nicholas, Copperas Hill (RC Chapel), and for St. Patrick, Toxteth, in 1827. The >other chapels start with civil registration or later. There was no great pressure on >Catholic priests to keep a marriage registers at this time (the early 1800s) because >the marriages were officially registered in the Anglican church. With the coming of >civil registration the clergy seem to have been nudged into better record keeping. > >From this it would appear that you need to check in which St. Nicholas' Registers the >marriage(s) were recorded. > >This does not provide any evidence one way or the other about the religious adherence >of either party in a marriage. > >Hope this helps. If any thing is not clear, send me a note.