Andreas Marriages 1655-1685

There are two copies of the Parish Register in the Manx Museum - one (Andreas PR2) is a 1827 copy which commences

This book is purchased by the Wardens ... for the purpose of transcribing all the baptism, funerals & marriages to be found registered in the Parish Registry Book beginning about six years after the restoration of the Royal family namely about the year 1666 and brought down, as correctly as the torn and abused state of the old Regr will admit, to the year 1799 being the year the old Church was determined at vestry to be pulled down and the present New Church determined and ordered ...

The other (Andreas PR1) and presumeably that of the 'torn and abused' state is in a fragile state but is readable without difficulty - this register too starts off by stating that some entries are copied out of an earlier one.

" The old church registry is much defaced, torn and abused, which (sic) was made by Sir John Huddlestone, curate, of Kirk Andreas, under the Rev Jonathan Fletcher, Archdeacon of this Isle and chaplain of the Earl of Derby, which is transcribed and writ in this new registry, as far as the names could be read and understood (beginning in 1666, after the restoration of the royal family, six years), by me, Charles Wattleworth."

The now very worn front page has date '[Mar] 28 1717 - price seven shillings six pence'.'

In 1911 all the Parish Registers were transcribed by the Civil Registry - these were filmed in the late 1940's by the Mormons and formed the basis of the Manx entries in the IGI - those records based on the 1911 transcription could be determined by the Batch Number. Since this period some Parishes and especially Andreas, have had these 1911 transcription entries partially removed and replaced by new entries entered into the IGI under various batch numbers in the 7xxxxxx series which appear as Patron submitted records prior to 1991 (call these the 'new' entries). When you fit these up against the remaining entries claiming to be from Parish Register transcriptions (call these the 'old' entries) it is obvious that those old entries which matched the new entry were deleted and thus appear with the 7xxxxxx batch, those that did not match (e.g. changes in transcription) remained thus giving the highly useful result that most of those that claim to be parish records are wrong transcriptions whereas the possibly more accurate ones are tagged as the generally unreliable (and at times totally spurious) patron submitted variety. As I wanted Marriage Statistics for my studies on Manx Demography it was worthwhile comparing the IGI, 1911 and 1827 transcriptions - the period post 1685 is deficient in the Registers until 1701.

The first point was that the 1911 transcription was in general very accurate (not unsurprising as both PR1 and PR2 are very clear (at least for Marriages, PR2 is less well written for Baptisms), I found one or two minor errors e.g. Jony transcribed as Jany). However the 1911 transcription omits all entries between the 17 August 1669 and 1671 ! (they are shown below) - there is no obvious reason for this as the entries comprise less than a page and those on the top half are included (in PR2 the missing entries straddle two pages). The IGI is mixed - those that claim to be from the 1911 transcription seem to be very accurate except for two mis readings where non-parishioners were indicated by attaching the name of the Town, thus Catherine Garrett of Lezayre was indexed as Lezayr and Nelly Black of Ramsey was indexed under Ramsey. However a significant fraction of the entries in the 1911 transcription were not under the PR Batch Numbers but under a few other Batch numbers which in general contained between 12 and 400 entries, not all Andreas) - one of these appears to be an accurate transcription, another adds days or months to entries which in PR1 & PR2 contain either just the year or year and month - these addition of days are generally the last day of the month indicated. There is also a general replacement of Mally by Molly throughout this transcription. A third batch has numerous small errors (mostly changes of Bahy to Bahey, Corlet to Corlett variety) but with some insertion of Christian names to entries which are marked as blanks in both PR1 and PR2 - the names are not infeasible, however checking the baptismal register of the period only the father's name was in general given, I suspect the transcriber assumed the blanks indicate the same name as the previous entry - there is no obvious justification for this assumption. In a couple of other cases completely spurious entries are found - possibly these belong to other years or parishes, or entries have been merged. I have not checked all IGI entries - merely those with large batches. Those entries missing from the 1911 transcription also appear to be missing from the IGI (based on sampling the 'new' names) thus it would appear that the IGI revisions are not based on either PR1 or PR2.

The Date given is that which appears in the PR (though standardised to day mon year) which had a number of 'out of sequence' entries. The order given below differs slightly from that in PR1 & PR2 and follows the old style calendar (i.e. year started March 25) . All dates have been re-organised by my database with the effect that those with incomplete dates may be moved to the start of the period though their original position is generally noted - it is a reasonable conjecture (though still an assumption) that the 1720 PR1 copy has them in the same sequence as the now lost 'original' register. However I suspect that part of 1672 entries should be under 1673 but PR1 is quite clear in including them under 1672. The table is not intended to be a literal transcription but an output from my database built for demographic purposes. The notes are a comment or in a few cases a copy of the original annotation, unlike entries after 1700 these annotations are infrequent.

Marriage, Baptisms and Confirmations upto 1757 may be found on CD_ROM

Family History		Andreas
Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor HTML Transcription © F.Coakley , 2008