We have added a new category of records – Vestry Minutes. So far, we have only a small set of 58 vestry minutes from Lanchester All Saints parish, covering Jan 1827 to the end of July 1828.

The vestry is the room in a church where the vestments and parish records are kept. The word was also used for a gathering of parish representatives who met in the vestry to carry out parish business. The vestry formed the fundamental unit of decision making for each parish, and acted as a miniature legislature for parochial government. Vestry minutes (the record of each meeting of the vestry) record, among other church business, the outlay of parish funds to cover the expenses of poor residents, such as burials or aid to impoverished children, which may be useful to your ancestral search. Some minutes simply record who was present at the meeting or who got money for what, and some have more useful details like a woman’s maiden surname or relationships.

Some minutes are terse, but can serve to establish someone’s presence in the parish at a specific time:

• 15 June 1827 Thomas Seymour – in the chair
• 7 Mar 1828 Joseph George Richmond – in the chair

Some minutes have more useful details:

• 18 May 1827 John Daglish – shall be at the expense of Thomas Ramshaw’s wife’s funeral when it may happen
• 16 May 1828 Jane Joice – late McLeod be allowed 1/- p.w. for her child
• 18 May 1827 George Greenwell – be allowed his expenses of removing John Hudson’s widow from Lanchester Lodge to South Shields or Westoe

We hope to add more to this collection soon now that we have rewritten our system code to accommodate the slightly different format demanded by these records (and if any of you were having trouble searching our site on Dec 15th or early on Dec 16th, that’s why; we temporarily broke some of the searches, but we believe they have been fixed now).

You can limit your search to Vestry Minutes by selecting that record category from the Search In: drop-down list on the search page.