>Hi list, > I have received a copy of a page from the OPR of Whitburn Parish on >which 5 children of one family are listed in consecutive order. The dates >range from August 1846 to December 1853. The birth ahead of that is dated >January 1854, and the one following is dated December 1846. They are not >alphabetical. > Question: Why would these five children all be listed consecutively, >and not chronologically with other births in the parish? Would someone in >the parish have copied these? When children were baptised the parents were then supposed to go the the parish clerk, pay a fee and have the baptisms entered in the register. By the 1840s this was being neglected especially in the cities. It has been calculated that only about one third of births are recorded in the parish registers in the large cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow (from census records). This is one of the reasons civil registration was brought in. In 1854 with civil registration forthcoming the following year there was a big effort to get parish registers updated, so most will have long lists such as this at the end, either after or within the entries for 1854. You sometimes see this sort of thing earlier. Around 1820 when new registers were brought in in all the churches, or randomly at other times, parents would "catch up". I've also seen a parish where the new minister found that the clerk hadn't kept the register at all for the last twenty years, so he inserted a note to the effect that he had been to all the families in the parish and copied the details from the family bibles. Of course any who had left the parish would be missed. Incidentally the families were given a baptism certificate when the children were baptised. I have photocopies of one or two, around two hundred years old, that have been passed down in one of my family lines. So possibly the families produced these certificates at the time when they had the "catch up" entries made in the register. Catherine