Where is this East Kent parish?

Are there others with the same name?

Does it appear in the Domesday Book?

What was its early population?

.Which civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions exercised control over it?

Have the parish registers survived, and if so, where are they, are they complete and have they been copied?

What other parochial and national records exist?

What material has been indexed?

A minor best seller a decade ago, this second edition is completely rewritten and reset, and incorporates the last ten years' developments in the worlds of East Kent genealogy and local history.
Having established an ancient parish or area of interest, this book will lead the researcher to the various collections of parochial records and enable him to organise an accurate plan of investigations. His time will be maximised by the addition of concise introductions to the history of the county as a whole, many aspects of genealogical and historical research, hints on common pitfalls, bibliographies and a parish map. A master gazetteer shows at a glance what is available for each parish and there is a unique index of over l,000 East Kent manors. In all, the book is the culmination of 30 years' work by a genealogist and historian with deep local knowledge: this resulting reference and research manual should benefit beginners and the more experienced alike.

This is a large and important field and closely allied to the Victorian census returns in as much as both were arranged in exactly the same registration districts. Much fuller details of the registration districts and their parishes, and the census returns with their records and indexes for the entire county of Kent, are available in a companion volume to this book, currently in preparation.
A centralised system for registering births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales began on 1st July 1837. The nation was divided into over 600 registration districts (many overlapping parts of two or more counties) overseen by a superintendent registrar who, every three months, would compile copies of the quarter's events in his district for transmission to Somerset House where they were sorted and again copied, this time into volumes of national indexes. It is therefore very quickly apparent that a large percentage of the errors in, and omissions from, the indexes are attributable to copying made by fallible human eyes and hands, a process still very much in operation, even in the age of the computer. The poor state of the indexes is a fact universally acknowledged, sometimes circumvented by the willingness of local registrars prepared to search their registers for an elusive event. What should also be universally acknowledged is that we shall never have a perfect set of indexes until the original volumes, all still held at the local offices, are made public and new indexes can be compiled directly from them. Until this happens, everyone should be aware that the registrars registered (and still register) births, deaths and civil marriages, but that the vast majority of religious marriages were (and still are) registered by the minister conducting the ceremony, who returns a quarterly copy in the usual way. Thus no registrar has a complete sequence of marriages for any particular church or chapel until the volume is full up and the duplicate book sent to his office; but even after this has been done the registrar will at best have a collection of marriage registers complete in themselves but wholly unconnected to any others - he cannot locate a marriage unless he is told where it took place, and then actually has the appropriate register to search. Moral: always obtain marriages from the FRC.
Having laboured with the civil registration indexes for some thirty years, I offer the following hard-won snippets in order that some abandoned research problems may be reassessed in a new light...............................