According to the "National Index of Parish Registers, Volume 4 Part 2", Petworth church is dedicated to "St. Mary, Our Lady of Pity". The "Our Lady of Pity" bit sounds like a Catholic name and perhaps that might have been phased out during the Reformation? Certainly, St. Mary is how the church is named today and it is the only Anglican church in the town. The West Sussex Burial Index to 1600 (WSBI) was originally compiled by WSRO volunteers about 15 years ago and entries in the early registers were copied onto 5" by 3" slips and these were filed into index drawers. Years later they were typed up and published by the Sussex Record Society on their web site. So, there is quite a bit of room for a transcription error to creep in as the data has been handled at least twice and some of these early registers are very, very difficult to read. The source for this particular burial is given as PAR 149/1/1/1 and that is the WSRO reference for the first Petworth Parish Register. The entry shows a burial on 22 Mar 1581 of Umfry DURRANT and the year may have been corrected from 1580. The National Burial Index (NBI) does have the burial on 22 Mar 1581, but under the name of Joane DURRANT, not Umfry DURRANT as appears on the WSBI. The PRTS transcript for Petworth also records the burial on 22 Mar 1581 for Joane DURRANT. The FamilySearch web site was originally built from data collected for baptisms and marriages for the International Genealogical Index back in the 1980's and burials were very rarely mentioned. If you check Steven Archer's web site at http://www.archersoftware.co.uk/igi/fs-ssx.htm you will be able to see just what data has been included in the Family Search site as at 2009 and there is no mention of burials at Petworth. Of course, many millions of records have been added to the FamilySearch since 2010, but I have just checked 10 burial entries shown on the PRTS transcript for 1580/1581 against FamilySearch and none of them are on the web site yet. Neither Ancestry nor Findmypast have Sussex parish registers included within their databases, although Findmypast does have the FFHS burials (and other) data that was originally submitted for publication by SFHG and appears in the NBI. However, the only real answer to this problem is, as always, to check the original entry in the parish register. I am planning to go to WSRO on Saturday and I will try and do it then, if you would like me to do so. I can't promise, as I now have quite a full research list for Saturday and I am not able to spend the whole day there, but I will try and fit it in somewhere. Best wishes, Marion Woolgar Bognor Regis, West Sussex SFHG Member No: 3323

I inspected the Petworth Parish Register yesterday for the burial on 22 Mar 1580/81 WSRO ref: PAR 149/1/1/1. This burial was for an Umfry DURRANT, not Joane DURRANT. The entry immediately above Umfry's was for a Joane BOWYER on 26 Feb 1580/81. So, perhaps the transcriber's eye line strayed momentarily and copied the Christian name of Joane from the line above and linked it to the DURRANT burial as well. It is something that is all too easy to do, especially in these old unruled registers. Best wishes, Marion Woolgar Bognor Regis, West Sussex SFHG Member No: 3323