Discover Chesterfield’s Black History

Chesterfield Museum and Chesterfield African Caribbean Community Association (ACCA) have joined forces to create a new exhibition that explores the history and experiences of the borough’s Black community. It aims to tell the story of Chesterfield’s Windrush Generation, highlighting the challenges they faced when establishing new lives in Chesterfield and how they overcame these. It …

Anglican ecclesiastical records

A guide to the archives of the Church of England in Derbyshire (edited 18 Oct 2022). In 1969, Derbyshire Record Office was legally designated by the Bishop of Derby as the Derby Diocesan Record Office and parish records are also deposited under the Parochial Registers and Records Measure 1978.  The office is also approved by …

Derbyshire Burials

A guide to using church burial and civil cemetery registers and to finding the location of a grave. Image: All Saints Church, Brailsford, c1930s (Ref: DCHQ002850) Note: Before civil registration was introduced in 1837, burial registers are the main source available to identify when a person died, as burials would have taken place within a …

Derbyshire Parish Registers Online

A guide to accessing Derbyshire Anglican church registers from 1538 online via Ancestry.     What are parish registers? Parish registers have been, and still are, created by all Anglican churches. They record ceremonies of baptism, marriage and burial. Between 1538 and 1753 all ceremonies were recorded in the same register, usually, though not always, …

Treasure 38: Eyam parish register 1630-1768

Since their introduction by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, parish registers have been used to record baptisms, marriages and burials across the country. They also provide a window on the past. In the case of this parish register, from the village of Eyam, it's a window looking in on the outbreak of plague which killed 260 …

Advent Calendar – Day 20

Derbyshire Parish Registers, edited by WPW Phillimore. and Lt Lt Simpson, often referred to simply as Phillimore's Published in 15 volumes this incredibly useful resource (which is available on the open shelves in the Computer Room) provides printed transcripts of marriage records from the earliest extant registers for each of the 75 parishes covered. As …

Advent Calendar – Day 14

10 days to Christmas eve... Marriage record of John Peach and Hannah Rowland on this day 237 years ago, in 1778. (Ref: D650/A/PI/1/3) Congratulations to everyone else who is marrying today, and around this time. It is a little unusual to find marriage records in this format at this time. Following Hardwick's Marriage Act, all …

Another day in the life of…

I may have been a bit eager to get the next instalment of 'a day in the life of...' written, as back at the beginning of November I did promise that another would follow in December, well we've hit 1 December so here it is. It felt like we probably had an ever so slightly …

Treasure 7: the Pleasley burial register, 1813-1893

This register (D739/A/PI/5/1) records all the burials in the parish of St Michael, Pleasley, from April 1813 to January 1893. Pleasley is one of the ancient parishes of Derbyshire, lying in the north-east of the county on the border with Nottinghamshire (Pleasley Hill is actually part of Nottinghamshire). It originally consisted of the townships of …

Registering a Complaint

As someone who spends a fair amount of my time searching through parish registers, I have been known to silently (or not so silently) curse the handwriting of a long-dead vicar or parish clerk.  They should have foreseen that a few centuries later I would need to decipher their scrawl to find Great-Great-Great-etc-Grandfather Fred!  So I was rather amused to find this …