Friday, June 24, 2011

Follow Friday - CCEd: Clergy of the Church of England database

I came across this database after reading a blog on FamilySearch which asked the question "What is a Chapelry?" For the past couple of weeks I have been  looking for my 3x and 4x Gt Grandparents living in Norfolk, England and have been searching through the Norfolk parish register images. I hadn't even thought about chapelries until the blog mentioned them.

Googling "chapelries" on the UK Google site pointed me to a website with an alphabetical index of all chapelries. This is just one section of a database featuring searches and lists of Clergy of the Church of England from the Reformation to the mid-nineteenth century. The description of this database, copied from CCEd: Clergy of the Church of England database is:

The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 (CCEd), launched in 1999 and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, makes available and searchable the principal records of clerical careers from over 50 archives in England and Wales with the aim of providing coverage of as many clerical lives as possible from the Reformation to the mid-nineteenth century. The Database fills major gaps in our knowledge of one of the most important professions in early modern England and Wales. It provides an invaluable research tool for both national and local, academic and amateur historians, and genealogists who often need to discover biographical information about individual clergymen or more about the succession of clergy in a particular place. CCEd is a collaboration between historians at King’s College London, the University of Kent and the University of Reading, and it is supported by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London.
The CCEd’s major features include:
  • Records relating to the major events of clerical careers – ordination, appointments as curates, rectors and lecturers
  • Information about parishes, chapelries and the many secular institutions and persons with chaplains
  • Information about patrons, many of them women
  • Information about schools and schoolteachers
  • Two search engines, one ‘Basic’ and the other ‘Advanced’, for investigating the records, as well as a Browse facility
  • A website, containing a host of useful aids, such as descriptions and maps for dioceses, lists of bishops and parishes, a glossary of terms, and an Online Journal containing essays and ‘notes and queries’
Using this database you can follow the career of a member of the clergy starting with his university education, which degrees he obtained, where he was ordained, the positions and parishes in which he served. For any parish you can find who served and when, their patrons,and livings.

I've found this fascinating. Here is the summary of Fairfax Francklin, Rector at Attleborough, Norfolk while my family were living.

Person: Francklin, John Fairfax (1791 - 1829)

  • CCEd Person ID: 113010

Education Events

  • BA : Cambridge / Clare Hall

  • MA

Ordination Events

  • deacon : 10/06/1827

  • priest : 08/06/1828

Appointment Events

  • Rector : Earsham (05/07/1791 - 14/04/1809 )

  • Stipendiary Curate : Attleborough (10/06/1827) 

  • Perpetual Curate : New Buckenham (23/10/1829 )