Just spent a frustrating morning trying to sort out my BRACEWELL/BRAISWELL ancestors at Kirkby Malham! I wonder if anyone else on Yorksgen is researching in this parish? It's a truly beautiful place in the Dales, but It really is the most frustrating and difficult parish to research for the following reason..... The original registers were stolen from the church by thieves in the 1970s, possibly because they were thought to contain two signatures of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, though it may just have been a chance theft. Anyway, they have never been found. There are other sources available, however. The Yorkshire Parish Register Society published in 1938 a printed transcription and index to the registers from 1597 to 1690 and the Rev. E. Cookson prepared before the First World War a transcript index of the period from 1690 to 1812/1813. Most of the Bishop's Transcripts (copies of the records) have survived and are at the Borthwick Institute in York. These are on the IGI on the FamilySearch website and have fairly recently also been put on the Findmypast website. Yet another source I have is a CD produced by the Wharfedale FHS in 2010 which made an excellent attempt to re-created the original registers of births and baptisms from 1691 to 1813, marriages from 1690-1812 and burials from 1692-1812, using the Cookson index. Adequate, you might think? Well, yes, as far as it goes, but I found a number of problems, specifically..... 1) Not all the sources seem to agree on dates for every record. 2) Some entries are in the re-created Cookson index but not the BTs and vice-versa. 3) On the Wharfedale FHS CD the early entries from 1 January to 24 March before the calendar changes of 1752 appear to have been "corrected" to New Style, while on the BTs now online at Findmypast they are in Old Style! To give an example, a William Bracewell, son of Jonathan, is shown on the CD as being baptised on 9 January 1704 but in the BTs at Findmypast the baptism appears as 9 January 1703. (For those who may not know what I am talking about, before the 1752 calendar changes the year ran from 25 March to 24 March, thus parish register entries in January, February and most of March were recorded as having taken place in the previous year; the date for William Bracewell's baptism should normally be written as 9 January 1703/4, however when this style has not been followed it can sometimes be difficult to know which year is being referred to). 4) Mistranscriptions! The marriage of my 5-x-great grandfather Nicholas Braiswell (or Bracewell) to Dorothy Bowker took place on Christmas Day 1747 and it is recorded correctly on the Wharfedale CD as Braiswell (Bracewell) but in the BTs at FMP he has been transcribed as BRADWELL, though the image clearly says Braiswell. Further, the IGI at FamilySearch gives the date of the marriage as 25 December 1741 - a contributed record with the 7 mistranscribed as a 1. 5) Nicholas looks likely to have been born in the 1720s and the re-constructed registers on the Wharfedale CD have a Nicholas Bracewell, son of David, baptised on 17 March 1723. However, on checking the BTs at Findmypast and looking at the image this showed that David Bracewell's son baptised on 17 March 1722/3 was not Nicholas but Richard! Furthermore, the Wharfedale CD has a Nicholas Bracewell buried on 17 March 1722 but no Nicholas appears in the BTs as being buried in the 1720s. Normally, I would accept the original registers over the BTs, but in this case where the "originals" are not the originals but a re-created and rebuilt transcript index, I must prefer to take the evidence of the BTs, otherwise who was my ancestor who married in 1747? I have been in this genealogy business for over 40 years but there are times when my head hurts! Researching the registers and BTs of Kirkby Malham is one of them. Roy Stockdill Professional genealogical researcher, writer and lecturer