Ancestry has added a new collection of over 200,000 records from the historic London borough <\/p>
Family history website Ancestry<\/a> has added two new major collections of records for people tracing ancestors from the London<\/a> borough of Kensington and Chelsea.<\/p>\n The first collection consists of 135,370 parish chest records, dating from 1597 to 1950.<\/p>\n Traditionally, all records of a parish church are kept in a strong box known as a \u2018parish chest\u2019. Similarly to the official parish registers, parish chest records include details of baptisms<\/a>, marriages<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and later Saint John\u2019s Island, which was renamed Prince Edward Island during his tenure. The records show that he was buried on 10 March 1818.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n