Ancestry has added a new collection of over 200,000 records from the historic London borough
Family history website Ancestry has added two new major collections of records for people tracing ancestors from the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
The first collection consists of 135,370 parish chest records, dating from 1597 to 1950.
Traditionally, all records of a parish church are kept in a strong box known as a ‘parish chest’. Similarly to the official parish registers, parish chest records include details of baptisms, marriages and burials. They also include records such as churchwarden accounts, pew rentals, apprenticeship records and membership lists. They can therefore be a good way of proving that your ancestor lived in a certain place at a certain time, similar to parish records.
Most of the records are from the Grade II* listed St Mary Abbots church, which has been associated with a number of famous figures over the years. For example, Edmund Fanning (1739-1818) was buried at the church, where his memorial stands today. He was born in America while it was a British colony and served with the British army during the American Revolutionary War. He later served as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia in Canada and later Saint John’s Island, which was renamed Prince Edward Island during his tenure. The records show that he was buried on 10 March 1818.
Another famous person whose burial is found in the St Mary Abbots records is Adrian Hardy Haworth (1767-1833), whose burial was on 27 August 1833. He was a scientist known for his work in entomology, botany and carcinology (the study of crustaceans) and wrote Lepidoptera Britannica, an authoritative work on British butterflies and moths.
The other record set is 66,506 Poor Law records, dating from 1695 to 1921. They record the money that was administered to the poor of the parish, particularly prior to the introduction of the workhouse system in 1834.