Some Cornish Family History

I’ve just come back from a foray into a small part of my Cornish family history. This involved a visit to the newish Cornwall Archives at Redruth. All very posh and multi-purpose, with very helpful staff but like many similar ventures, fewer actual research facilities. ‘Have you been here before?’ I was asked and could reply confidently that indeed I had. In fact, Cornwall was my first ever archive visit way back in 1978. I did then have to admit that my last visit was in 1983. I think the premises have moved three times since then!

I had ordered a pile of documents in advance and set forth photographing them. Several of these were leases, so had to be captured in multiple images and will take me a lifetime to transcribe but hey ho. I also arrived armed with an extensive list of parish register entries, that I had written out by hand from the original registers on my previous visits over forty years ago. I was hoping to get images for my files. Sadly the two microfiche readers that allow you to download images directly to a memory stick were booked when I rang to reserved my documents but my luck was in as one became free when I was there. It should have been straightforward, as I knew exactly what I was looking for. Using the reader was definitely not intuitive, want it to go right, push it left, want it to go up, pull it down. I never was very good at patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time. Add to this the fact that I was mostly after seventeenth and eighteenth century entries, in registers where baptisms, marriages and burials might all be mixed together, or basically just written on any old spare page and finding the entries that I wanted took forever. I managed to knock about a third off my list but have since added more from another Cornish branch of the family. I might be forced not to leave it another forty years to return.

The gems amongst the documents included two instances of my ancestors coming before the courts for what was categorised at the time as fornication. I couldn’t help feeling a tad sorry for Philip and Elizabeth Buckingham, who married in February 1759. Their oldest child was baptised three months later. Getting married was not sufficient to satisfy the powers that be and despite being married, they were hauled up in front of the Archdeaconry Court. This however didn’t happen until eighteen months later. Was there a backlog? Was this normal? Was it eighteen months before anyone decided to complain? In any case, they had to perform a public penance in front of the congregation, admit their fault, promise to mend their ways and ask the parishioners to pray for them.

At the end of 1725, or in the early years of 1726, another ancestor, Frances Geach, gave birth to a daughter who she named Mary Roberts Geach. The baptism register records that Spry Roberts was the reputed father. In the July, Spry was also ordered to do penance; there is no record of Frances being summonsed as well. The scene of his public penance was St Stephen’s, Saltash, shown in the photograph above. The requirements were similar to the Buckinghams’ case but Spry was instructed to have his head uncovered, be bare-footed and bare-legged, to put a white sheet round his shoulders and carry a white rod in his hand. Despite this public humiliation, within a year, Frances was once again pregnant with one of Spry’s children.

It is documents like this that really bring our ancestors’ stories to life; yet another reminder that not everything is available online.