Births, Marriages and Deaths in Wivenhoe

Transcriptions of the registers from 1560 from Wivenhoe St. Mary the Virgin Parish Church

Research by Helen Barrell

The Parish Church of Wivenhoe - St Mary the Virgin
Photo by the late Sue Murray ARPS
691The Wivenhoe History Group is extremely grateful to Helen Barrell whose website is Essex and Suffolk Surnames (http://essexandsuffolksurnames.co.uk) and on which she published the details below.
These details will be of considerable interest to anyone researching Wivenhoe names.  For anyone wishing to get in touch with Helen, her email address is: contact@essexandsuffolksurnames.co.uk
Helen said: “I am transcribing Wivenhoe parish registers held at ERO for St. Mary the Virgin, CoE Church. Full transcriptions are available below. All these transcriptions can be searched for at www.FreeREG.org.uk” [Note: We think Helen Barrell has been doing a fantastic job for everybody keen on researching their family history – Peter Hill, Chairman, Wivenhoe History Group]

Please note that Helen Barrell is only part way through this massive project and has transcribed these records only up to approximately the year 1850. For more exact dates, please below. Notes:

  • Mothers’ maiden names appear in the register from 1617-1626.
  • There is a gap in the early marriages register. Marriages run from 1560-1623, then from 1648 onwards. There is a gap 1683-4, then 1686-1687, then 1690-91.
  • Gap in early burials – only one burial for 1587, and none at all for 1588. Burials stop at July 1682, there is one burial recorded in 1686, and three in December 1688.
  • In the 1500s and 1600s, the number of burials each year is around thirty, but in 1603, this number nearly triples – 94 people were buried in Wivenhoe that year, and deaths in 1604 were unusually high too. Clearly, some form of contagious disease hit the village, but there is no note in the register to say what it might have been, although we do know that plague hit London in 1603, beginning in June. Burials increase in Wivenhoe from August, which suggests the disease spread up from London in the space of a few months. This article on the plague in Colchester, from 1579-1666 (from the Colchester Archaeological Trust Online Report Library) is worth reading, although it doesn’t mention Wivenhoe.
  • The churchyard was closed for burials in 1859. Please contact Wivenhoe Town Council for a look-up for burials after that date, which took place in the Old and New Cemeteries. There is a fee for this service, which presumably goes towards the maintenance of the cemeteries.
  •                                                                                                          Helen Barrell

Baptisms

Burials

Marriages

1560-1689

1692-1754
Note: Groom abodes and marital status in groom list only, and brides vice versa.

1754 – 1812 

1813-1837

1837 onwards

  • To follow
This page was added on 24/03/2015.

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