Adrian has just sent us all a fascinating piece on the records of stillborn children in burial registers. I have found one recorded in a 'baptism' register: Waltham Holy Cross, Essex (the parish which includes the town of Waltham Abbey): 12th November 1654 - [no first name] "The still=bourne daughter to [Tho.?] and Alice Anneley." If anyone with an Ess Anc sub wants to see for themselves, look up D/P 75/1/5 image 5. However, note that I put the word baptism in single quote marks above - this parish's baptism registers changed without warning or explanation from recording baptisms to recording births, according to its headings, from the commencement of this register in October 1653, until about a third of the way through it when the births entered for June 1662 are followed without any explanation by baptisms for July 1662, on the same page (image 28), and onwards. I initially thought that the clerk put 'births' as a heading in the new register by accident and really meant baptisms, but this stillborn entry seem to show that it really was births being recorded. Also, this register's first birth is dated 3 days prior to the earlier register's last recorded baptism, adding weight to this being the case. But why would births be entered in a register and not baptisms? If it was due to some law or enactment then surely there would have been some sort of note made in the register, but there isn't. If anyone has some insight into this I'd love to know! I did wonder if the start and end dates of this group of birth records (1653-1662) were significant - the start roughly coincides with the Protectorate, more closely with the Barebones Parliament, and the end seems to tie in with the Act of Uniformity, or perhaps more accurately the Clarendon Code (see Wikipedia for all of these). Adding a bit of weight to this, the church of the above parish has the Royal Arms of Charles II hanging on one of its walls, which curiously do not bear the date of his coronation, 1660, but the date 1662. I always thought it had something to do with celebrating the Act of Uniformity; if so, then perhaps the reversion to baptisms in the registers in the same year was related somehow? But the fact still stands that we have a stillborn baby entered into the 'baptism' records of our parish's church! By the way, we at WA Hist Soc are in the process of transcribing & indexing the entire parish registers from 1563 to 1912, and with the church PCC's collaboration up to 2009; the first stage, initial transcription, is complete, though the entries now need to be double-checked. A few initial statistics for anyone interested: christenings/births 1563-1812: 14,537 christenings 1813-1912: 11,031 marriages 1563-1812: 3,527 marriages 1813-1893: 1,506 burials 1563-1812: 17,370 burials 1813-1900: 6,739 Note that these figures refer to entry lines in our spreadsheets, which may be slightly different to actual numbers of events. It may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that all these entries were transcribed by only one person, over the last three years. That's dedication! Still, as a retired GP he is very well qualified to decipher poor handwriting! If we were to publish these in the same format as we have already done for small extracts, which is one entry per line and about 50 lines to an A4 page, the resulting publication would have over a thousand pages! I think we might be going digital with this one... Cheers, Lawrence