NOTES.

Parish registers.—­Statistics.

Among the good services rendered to the public by yourself and your correspondents, few, I think will be found more important than that of having drawn their attention to Mr. Wyatt Edgell’s valuable suggestions on the transcription of Parochial Registers.  The supposed impracticability of his plan has perhaps hitherto deterred those most competent to the work from giving it the consideration which it deserves.  I believe the scheme to be perfectly practicable; and, as a first move in the work, I send you the result of my own dealings with the registers of my parish.

It is many years since I felt the desideratum which Mr. Edgell has brought before the public;{2} and, by way of testing the practicability of transcribing, and printing the parochial registers of the entire kingdom in a form convenient for reference, I made an alphabetical transcript of my own, which is now complete.  The modus operandi which I adopted was this:—­1.  I first transcribed, on separate slips of paper, each baptismal entry, with its date, and a reference to the page of the register, tying up the slips in the order in which the names were entered in the register; noting, as I proceeded, on another paper, the number of males and females in each year.

2.  The slips being thus arranged, they came in their places handy for collation with the original.  I then collated each, year by year; during the process depositing the slips one by one in piles alphabetically, according to the initial letter of the surnames.

3.  This done, I sorted each pile in an order as strictly alphabetical as that used in dictionaries or ordinary indices.

4.  I then transcribed them into a book, in their order, collating each page as the work proceeded.

5.  I then took the marriages in hand, adopting the same plan; entering each of these twice, viz. both under the husband’s and the wife’s name.

6.  Next, the burials, on the same plan.

7.  I then drew up statistical tables of the number of baptisms, marriages, and burials in each year, males and females separately where the register appeared badly kept, making notes of the fact, and adding such observations as occasionally seemed necessary.

8.  I then drew up lists of vicars, transcripts of miscellaneous records of events, and other casual entries that appeared in the register.[1]

I noted, as I went on, the time occupied in each of these operations.  It was as follows:—­

1.  The first transcripts on slips, with addition of statistical tables—­