The Catholic Marriage Index - Introduction.
Introduction to The Anstruther's Catholic Marriage and Baptism Indexes.
Mr. Anthony Adolph, who in the early 1990, completed a study of the Index and wrote the following article. A copy of which kindly supplied for inclusion as an introduction to this vast great work completed by Fr. Anstruther, all entries having been hand written on individual pages contained in many clip files.
Reference is made to smaller Indexes of Wills and obituaries, these were not transcribed by the P.R.T. Society. P. Steward P.R.T. Society.
THE CATHOLIC MARRIAGE INDEX
Anthony Adolph
First published in Family History (journal of the IHGS), vol. 16, np 129, NS 105. October 1991.
Fr Godfrey Anstruthcr O.P., B.és Sc.Hist., formerly of St Edmund's College, Ware, died on the 23rd July 1988, having been a priest in the Dominican Order for some sixty years. He was trained as an historian at Louvain and published several works including Vaux of Harrowden, and the important series The Seminary Priests besides numerous articles based on abstracts of Catholic Wills of which those in the Essex Recusant and the London Recusant are of particular note. He spent his later years at St Dominic's Priory at Carisbrooke. He suffered a bad fall and as he said himself his life was saved only because his strong spectacles took the brunt of the blow. Since then his work on the Catholic Marriage Index was curtailed and in 1984 he gave this and its attendant indexes to the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury.
The index covers some 30,000 marriages, chiefly for London and Essex from the mid-eighteenth century to approximately the 1870's. It is divided into a main index for grooms with a cross-referencing index for brides and it is supplemented by four smaller indexes of Wills, obituaries and adult baptisms. This is a particularly important source for Irish in London.
Information given in the grooms' index consists of the names of both parties including in most cases the location of the event and the name of the officiating priest, the source of the information, the couple's residences and their parents' names. Additional information is given in some cases, particularly in the form of notes from obituaries or probate material. An example of this is the entry for the marriage of Sir Thomas Flcetwood to Mary Winifred Bostock at Spanish Place in 1771, which has appended to the entry a note of the date (1802) and place of the groom's death. Witnesses are usually only copied if they areclearly relatives of the bride or groom. The brides' index simply states the groom's name besides that of the bride for cross-referencing.
Fr Anstruther's original intention was that his index should cover Catholic chapels and churches in London north of the Thames from 1837 to 1870. This latter date was chosen because, he wrote, "I fondly imagined that for marriages after 1870 all you had to do was ask grandma". The historical scope of the index later expanded and it eventually came to cover forty-seven of the available Catholic registers of marriages for the area of London, ranging from Hampstead to the West and East Ends. It also covers three Catholic parishes south of the river Bermondsey - Greenwich and Woolwich - seventeen Essex parishes and missions including the Crondon Park registers which date from 1761 and a few entries from places as far a field as Cambridge and Hunstanton. Many London Catholic churches were founded in the 1850's and thereafter in response to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy and the great influx of Irish Catholics into the country but the index also covers the Catholic chapels which pre-date this period. The registers of St Mary's, Cadogan Street, Chelsea, for example, contain marriages from 1814 onwards, the foundation of that church lying in the period between the Catholic Relief and Catholic Emancipation Acts, whilst the Embassy chapels of Sardinia, Venice, Portugal, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire contain the marriages of numerous London Catholics from the eighteenth century. Also included in the index are the personal registers of itinerant priests such as Bruno Cantrill and Arthur Pacificus Baker who were active in the capital and elsewhere during the eighteenth century. Many of these registers are individually printed by the Catholic Record Society but by bringing together these surviving records of penal times alongside post- emancipation registers the index shows numerous cases of continuity of worship by people of the same surname whose relationship to one another is often elucidated; the genealogical value of this is apparent, especially in the many cases of families who moved from central London to suburbs such as Hammersmith and Hampstead during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Many of the registers from the earlier period are, even for those with a good knowledge of Latin, quite difficult to read; their transcription in the Catholic Record Society volumes and the Catholic Marriage Index is therefore of great value to family historians. In addition to the above sources there are cases of apparently conforming marriages being entered on the index where it was apparent that both parties were definitely Catholic. The marriage of William Havers to Mary Carpue in 1802 at St Paul's, Covent Garden, is a case in point; taken in isolation it appears to be a normal conforming marriage but knowledge of both families from Catholic registers and probate material shows that both parties were most definitely Catholic, hence their inclusion. Fr Anstruther includes information on Mary Carpue's parents, who are of course not named in the original entry; this information is derived from probate material and memorial inscriptions.
Many eighteenth-century London Catholics married solely according to Catholic rites and the Catholic registers indexed are the only source of such unions. After Hardwicke's Marriage Act it became customary for Catholics to undergo separate Church of England (or after 1837, civil) and Catholic ceremonies and the details of both events can be of great utility. A civil marriage certificate obtained from the G.R.O. details a marriage on the 4th November 1840 at Marylebone between William Adolph and Maria Brown, giving the usual details of occupation, residence and father's name. The corresponding entry on the Catholic Marriage Index shows a ceremony which took place three weeks later on the 23rd November at Spanish Place, the entry in this case having different witnesses and being supplemented by Fr Anstruther with notes from the corresponding entry in The Tablet which gives details of the bride's father not found on the civil record and of her mother's father and further to this there are notes of both parties, obituaries from The Catholic Directory. It was, however, from the civil certificate that an address was obtained for a search of the 1841 census. In another case, from 1877, the civil and Catholic marriages took place on the same day; on the civil certificate a witness was described as Jabez Watson. This family was quite well documented and no-one of the name Jabez had previously been encountered. The Catholic marriage, found in the index, gave the witness's name as Joseph Watson, a name common to both the bride's father and brother. Obtaining both the civil and Catholic marriage entries is therefore very worthwhile; finding the relevant entry in the Catholic Marriage Index in a recent instance saved having to make a lengthy search in the G.R.O. in order to obtain the civil marriage certificate.
One of the original aims of the index was to assist the large number of Catholics of Irish origin to trace their ancestry through very common Irish surnames in the metropolis. The problems of doing this were especially great because, before heavy penalties were introduced in 1872 for non-registration of births, marriages and deaths, many people did not register such events and the poor Irish Catholics, quite understandably, fell very much into this category. There are many Irish names to be found in the index; whole files are devoted to the names Sullivan, Donovan, Brien, McCarthy, Murphy and their variants; the advantage of using the Catholic Marriage Index rather than the indexes of general registration will be apparent, as the names of fathers, spouses and occupations are easily noted. Finding several instances of the same father's name can enable one to build up a full picture of a family which would be extremely expensive if not impossible using the indexes of the G.R.O. before or after 1911.
Brief notice may also be given to the smaller indexes which supplement the Catholic Marriage Index.
The listing of the parishes covered by the main index is in itself a valuable work of reference for London Catholic records. For each church or chapel is given the date of commencement of registers, details of gaps, comments on the condition of the records and other notes of similar value. Listings of the priests whose names appear in the registers are given (together with the abbreviations of their names which are used throughout the groom's index), also notes on baptisms and on the history of each place, if relevant - for example, details of the merging of old missions into post-1850 parishes.
There is an index of London Wills of Catholics ranging from the early nineteenth century to at least the 1930's. Many entries seem to be abstracts from the calendars at Somerset House but plenty predate 1858. Supplementary notes are added from school registers, newspapers such as The Times, The Catholic Times, The Catholic Herald and The Universe and works such as Who Was Who. Another index may be loosely described as one of obituaries containing more notes from obituary notices in Catholic and secular newspapers and periodicals; it is chiefly concerned with priests but includes many members of the laity; even some personal letters containing biographical information have been included and also some notes on Catholic schools. The last index is one of conditional baptisms of converts which is most valuable as entries often include references to subsequent marriages to other Catholics and also invariably give dates of birth and parents' names for the convert. It is important to note, however, that it was rare to baptise converts sub condition before 1870. It should also be noted that some baptisms (of infants and adults) are indexed in the brides' index, for example those for Brook Green from 1710 to 1838.
The Catholic Marriage Index and its supplementary indexes cover, with various exceptions and caveats, the sizeable Catholic community in London from the early to mid-eighteenth century to the early part of the present century. Many of the traditional areas of English Catholicism had close links with London and many Catholic families had cousins in the metropolis, be this through the sons of the gentry attending the Inns of Court or through northern yeomen sending their sons to be apprenticed to Catholic tradesmen in London. Refugees from the French Revolution appear in the Catholic registers of London and later in the nineteenth century Irish names appear with increasing frequency.
Since 1984 the Catholic Marriage Index has been administered from the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies.
This article expands on that of Cecil R. Humphery-Smith in The English Catholic Ancestor, Autumn 1987.
