Blisworth Church Records

from 1547 to 1922

The village church records, as a series of volumes, was placed in the care of the conservatory department at the Northampton Records Office (NRO) in approximately 1960.  The son of the Rector at the time, a Mr. Jonathan Bunker, worked with a villager, Mrs. Eileen Rose, who helped with translations of the earliest entries from Latin script, to produce a series of sheets which were printed into the books that are now available to any member of the public at the NRO.  We are very grateful for the work done by these two people which has resulted in accessible copies of the records.  This page aims to make the information from those books available as PDF files.  These files may be electronically searched for names thus providing an important service to family researchers.

There have been two initiatives towards a successful digitisation once it was realised that some files from the original work were on computer media that is now unreadable.  The first was in 2006, when all the individual pages of the records were scanned to create high quality jpeg images.  These were then processed in OCR software and formatted for MSWord.  The 'Word' files have been used as a search base to assist enquiries from the public made through this website since that date.  The second, in 2011/12 by Robin Freeston, was to copy by hand using a laptop at the NRO the whole of the records into MSExcel files; this latter activity carried out unfortunately without the knowledge that the first had been done.  Notwithstanding that point, the entire records formatted in Excel offers advanced features for search and data sorting - indeed for checking the integrity of the 2006 data processing.

Here the 'Word' files from the first initiative have been merged, where possible, and made available, reformatted as PDF files.  Regarding records for births (baptisms or christenings), marriages and deaths (burials), the partition of the original records into books, which changed through the near five centuries of recording, is reflected in the five bars shown in the diagram below - each bar corresponds to a file which can be downloaded.  To download a file simply click on a bar and look for the file in the 'usual' place on the hard drive.  Downloading to file is forced, rather than opening in the browser for reading.

The arrangement of the columns (ie. the precise tabulation) from page to page of the original documents was not found to be consistent.  This was due to limitations of the OCR software but does not detract from the usefulness of the files.  There may be occasional mistakes made by the OCR process due to blemished characters on the original.  Some abbreviations are commonplace: d = daughter, s = son, w or wid = widow, wr or widr  = widower, sp = spinster, bach = bachelor, otp = 'of this parish' and inf = infant.  In using the files to search for names no problems are anticipated but, in some places, the records are not listed in exact date order.  Therefore, in a search around a particular date, the user is advised to sweep through a small number of adjacent pages to find all parts of that year.

Some of the records at the NRO are complete to dates as late as 1970 but are here truncated to the year 1922.  This is at slight variance with the National Census policy on data protection but at least the website will be in reasonable harmony for the next 15 years or so and researchers can look for details over the war years 1914-18 and through the Grafton Estate sale in 1919.  In due course my successor may be reminded to extend the date of the truncation to ~1945.                                                                                                 Tony Marsh  20 May 2012