Four Centuries of Parish Registers 

The lives behind the names

Some of the most remarkable treasures connected with St Andrew’s are not made of stone, glass or wood.

They are books.

For centuries, the parish registers of Kildwick recorded the baptisms, marriages and burials of the people who lived across this enormous ancient parish. Page after page preserves names which might otherwise have disappeared completely.

The earliest surviving Kildwick registers begin in the reign of Elizabeth I. The first burial was recorded on 29 March 1572, the first baptism on 13 November 1575, and the first marriage on 13 May 1576.

Together, the registers provide an extraordinary record of generations of life in and around Kildwick.

The first names

The first baptism recorded in the surviving register is that of William Overend, son of Henry and Alice Overend, baptised on 13 November 1575.

Remarkably, more than three centuries later the same family name was still found in the parish. In 1906, another William Overend was a member of the church choir.

It is a small example of what makes parish registers so fascinating.

They are not simply lists of names. They connect people living in the same communities across centuries.

Carefully preserved

By the beginning of the twentieth century there were thirty-six volumes of Kildwick parish registers, including nine books recording banns of marriage. The earliest volumes were noted for their excellent condition, evidence of the care with which successive generations had preserved them.

The oldest surviving volume had itself been recopied from an earlier book. Its title describes it as a register of those:

“baptized, maryed, or buried”

in the parish of “Kyldwycke-in-Craven”.

The surviving book was prepared in 1598, its entries having been checked against the older copy by the minister and churchwardens.

The people responsible understood that these records mattered.

More than four centuries later, we can see just how right they were.

An enormous parish

The registers belonged to a Kildwick very different from the parish we know today.

St Andrew’s was the mother church of an ancient parish stretching across a large part of Craven. Consequently, its registers contain generations of people from communities including Kildwick, Cononley, Farnhill, Bradley, Silsden, Steeton, Eastburn, Sutton, Glusburn and Cowling.

Farmers and labourers, weavers and tradespeople, clergy and landowners all appear.

The registers allow us to glimpse not simply the history of a church, but the changing population of an entire landscape.

More than names and dates

Some entries tell us considerably more than who was baptised, married or buried.

Occasionally the person making the entry added a few words explaining what had happened. Those brief comments can suddenly bring an otherwise unknown life into view.

In 1789, for example, the burial register records Margaret Lambert of Brunthwait, who had drowned in the canal three days earlier.

In 1792, it records three sons, Thomas, James and Abraham, born together to James and Mary England of Silsden.

In 1794, William Chappel of Farnhill lost his way while travelling from Addingham and was later found dead. Other entries record deaths in childbirth, accidents and people who died far from home.

A sentence in a register may be almost all that remains of someone's story.

A daughter who arrived too late

One particularly poignant entry comes from the eighteenth century.

Mary Barrett of Kildwick died and was buried on 13 March. Her daughter, Esther Turner, was travelling from Lancashire to Kildwick, apparently to visit her sick mother.

Esther died at Keighley on the journey and was buried only days later.

The two entries preserve a small human tragedy from a world in which travel was slow and news could take days to reach members of a family.

Without the parish register, their story might have disappeared entirely.

The wider world reaches Kildwick

The registers also reveal how events beyond the parish affected ordinary life.

Changes in government and Church affected the way records were kept. In 1783, a government duty was imposed on baptisms, marriages and burials, and its arrival was duly recorded in the Kildwick books.

Earlier volumes contain glimpses of the upheavals of the seventeenth century. One burial entry even refers to the dangerous circumstances of the English Civil War.

National history was happening far beyond Kildwick, but traces of it found their way onto the pages of the parish registers.

Birth, marriage and death

In 1626, parish clerk Peter Barrett began a new register book.

He arranged its contents in the order of human life: first those baptised, then those married, and finally those buried. He even added Latin verses explaining the arrangement.

A person is born, marries and, eventually, is buried.

It is a wonderfully simple description of what these books contain.

But between those three events were entire lives.

Four centuries of ordinary lives

Kings and queens, wars and great political events dominate our history books.

The parish registers tell a different kind of history.

They preserve William Overend, baptised in 1575; Margaret Lambert, drowned in the canal in 1789; Sarah Laycock of Cononley, who died aged 28 only five days after her marriage in 1792; and countless others whose lives unfolded in the farms, villages and townships around Kildwick.

For hundreds of years they came to St Andrew’s to be baptised, to marry and to bury those they loved.

Their names remain in the registers.

Taken together, those thousands of names tell the story not simply of St Andrew’s, but of generations of people who called this part of Craven home.