Not only are all of Devon's Parish Registers
not in the IGI, many are missing, either in whole or in part. There are numerous reasons for
this. Some have been damaged from four centuries of inadequate storage,
leaving fragile pages totally unreadable; others have had pages cut out or
mutilated - perhaps in an effort to hide a marriage or the entry of a
bastard birth. There are those with tantalising gaps of several
years - times when the parish had no incumbent to oversee the keeping of
records, and there are those which have, over time, simply been
lost. In 1538 the keeping, in parishes, of registers of baptisms,
marriages and burials was first ordered but by no means everyone
complied - there are parishes in Devon where more than a
century was to pass before the law was finally complied with. These
problems can bring
family history research to a full stop unless we search for other
documentary insights into our ancestors' lives.
The coming of William the Conqueror could have
done the family historian a favour, in that he, and his Norman henchmen,
brought with them a passion for making lists. The Domesday Survey was
just the beginning: those lists of property, servants, farm implements,
and animals plus the names of all the principal people in each town or
village made it easy to invent a method of taxation still in use today.
Lists of taxpayers led to lists of able-bodied men who must serve in the
militia if required and the control of wills meant that even dying could
be monitored - and taxed.
The concept of the State as a controlling force
came to fruition in 1538 with the establishment of a register for each
parish in which the birth, marriage, and death of every citizen was
permanently recorded. The register was not a matter of religion - it was
a system which, for centuries, enabled the State to keep tabs on
everyone, from birth to death. Some far-sighted official must have
foreseen the possibility that it might fail through human weakness and
decreed that all those other lists of people and property should be
saved. From that time on, millions of priceless records have been
carefully stored away all over our land, surviving wars, fires and
pestilence right up to today. They provide us with many alternative
routes back to the past and give us a salutary reminder that although
you may tear a page from a parish register, the tax inspector has
already got your name.
