On 13/11/15 17:13, Doug Laidlaw wrote: > Richard Smith wrote: > >> Has anyone encountered the names Isaac and John being used >> interchangeably? I'm trying to untangle the Kemish family of >> Michelmersh, Hants in the late 17th / early 18th century, and a lot of >> things would slot neatly into place if the Isaac who appears in the >> parish registers in the 1680s was the same man as the John who appears >> in the 1670s and 1690s. But I've heard heard of them being treated as a >> single name before. Has anyone else? >> >> Richard > > The recference to the "Commonwealth Gap" in replies interested me. What > records existed before the Commonwealth? From here in Oz, I think that the > furthest back I have been able to go is 1700. > During the Commonwealth period (that's Cromwell's Commonwealth) the church was no longer responsible for maintaining registers. The early registers - where they've survived at all, end in 1653. Civil registrars took over but this arrangement ended with the restoration. The civil registers were often lost although they could have been taken over by the church and continued as new volumes of parish registers. That's what happened in the case of the two parishes I'm interested in. If they were lost there's a gap. -- Hotmail is my spam bin. Real address is ianng at austonley org uk

On 14/11/15 09:41, Ian Goddard wrote: > During the Commonwealth period (that's Cromwell's Commonwealth) the > church was no longer responsible for maintaining registers. The early > registers - where they've survived at all, end in 1653. Although the churches no longer had a legal obligation to maintain registers, that doesn't mean they all stopped doing so. In this particular corner of Hampshire, most continued. Michelmersh, Hants, the parish I mentioned at the start of this thread does have a "Commonwealth gap": there are no baptisms recorded between Sept 1653 and Oct 1660. But of the seven neighbouring parishes, four continued recording, two more don't have registers for the period at all, and only one has a "Commonwealth gap". The next three parishes to the west, an area of particular relevance to this family, all continued recording too. Richard