We are currently working on the parish registers and the census records for Hickling and information will follow as soon as we have it ready. If you have any queries, please use the general enquiry email address: info@hicklingnottslocalhistory.com .
(February 2022) We now have scanned images of the original Parish Registers for Hickling (Births, Deaths and Marriages); unfortunately, there is still a considerable amount of work to be done.
The Hickling records begin in 1646 and they carry fascinating indications of the people involved: massive ink blots that have soaked through several pages; notes with extra information, even doodles & sketches. Each Rector has his own style and, inevitably, greater or lesser degrees of illegible handwriting …
Ultimately, we hope to be able to make transcriptions available but, in the meantime, if you would like to check any of your research against the original entries, please contact us.
In addition, we have recently purchased access to a collection of transcriptions of parish records across Nottinghamshire which has been meticulously produced by volunteers of the Nottinghamshire Family History Society; please contact us, if you have any enquiries that we can help with.
Parish Registers are the best local history resource available to us and we are fortunate that the Hickling records have survived (available on microfiche at Notts County Archives) – these records were written down at the same time as the event being registered; as reliable as it is possible to get with first person involvement! They can often be quite quirky – spellings can be unreliable (often simply phonetic), handwriting can be illegible, pages can be damaged (mould and ink spills) and the rector or clerk sometimes added notes which offer snippets of local information.
The Pallot’s Marriage & Baptismal Index.
We first came across Pallot’s Marriage Index following an enquiry into the Hickling marriage of Joseph Burton and Mary Dixon in 1810; a family researcher sent us a copy of the slip of paper for this marriage and asked us to look up the original parish record; both images are below.
The Pallot’s Marriage Index was the property of Pallot and Co. but is now held by Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Cambridge (it is also available online through Ancestry). It index includes records of marriages between 1780 and 1837 when civil registration of marriages began. It contains over 1.5 million records covering 2,600 parishes across London and the rest of England (with some overseas records, too).
The Index was started in 1813 and continued for 150 years, using handwritten slips of paper which recorded the names of the bride & groom, the date and location of the marriage and sometimes additional information such as occupation and whether the bride and groom were bachelors, spinsters, widows or widowers. The information was collected by agents of the company for business use (although, so far, we haven’t found details of what the business was or how they used these records).
Baptismal records were also collected but the Index was badly damaged in the Blitz with about 100,000 entries surviving.
Boyd’s Marriage Index
Boyd’s Marriage Index covers the period 1538 to 1837 and is held by the Society of Genealogists. It is a typed list in 533 volumes listing 3.5 million marriage records. However, the original volumes are not in any order – they have now been transcribed and can be accessed via subscription sites (Find My Past). The entries are very simple; names of the bride & groom, year of marriage and the county of parish where the marriage took place.