To singe a goose

[gardener]

Dickens on Parish Registers

As the poorest man cannot foresee to what inheritance he may succeed, through the instrumentality of Parochial registers, so in their preservation every member of the community is more or less interested; but the Paris Register returns of 1833 show that a general feeling seemed to exist in favour of their destruction. Scarcely one of them pronounced the Registers in a satisfactory state. The following sentences abound in the Blue Book: “leaves cut out,” “torn out,” “injured by damp,” “mutilated,” “in fragments,” “destroyed by fire,” “much torn,” illegible,” “tattered,” “imperfect,” “early registers lost”.
Thanks to the General registry Act of William the Fourth, all such records made since 1835 are now properly cared for; but those prior to that date are still in parochial keeping, to be torn, lost, burnt, interpolated, stolen, defaced, or rendered illegible at the good pleasure of every wilful or heedless individual of a destructive organisation. Some time ago Mr. Walbran, of Ripon, found part of a Parish Register among a quantity of waste-paper in a cheesemonger's shop. The same gentleman has rescued the small but very interesting register of the chapelry of Denton, in the county of Durham, from the fate which once had nearly befallen it, by causing several liberatim copies to be printed and deposited in public libraries. Among other instances of negligent custody, Mr. Downing Bruce, the barrister, relates in a recently published pamphlet, that the Registers of South Otterington, containing several entries of the great families of Talbot, Herbert, and Fauconberg, were formerly kept in the cottage of the parish clerk, who used all those preceding the eighteenth century for waste paper; a considerable portion having been taken to “singe a goose”.


From "Household Words", March 30th 1851, page 351.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_TMF ... ds&f=false

No wonder we can't find all that we want!

[gardener]

Dickens: Curiosities of parish book-keeping.

As to the early dates, many of the registers (kept sometimes by negligent incumbents) are defective by reason of gaps, omissions, and other acts of carelessness. For example, the clergyman of Tunstall, in Kent, was annoyed by the number of persons with a particular name - Pottman - among his parishioners. In one year he christened three Pottmans by the name of Mary, and soon afterwards, in fifteen 'sixty-seven, the disgusted pastor coolly writes in the register, “From henceforwd I omit the Pottmans.” In another parish, a clerk who was a grocer took waste paper for the wrappings of his groceries, out of the parish register, and so established some considerable gaps; other registers had leaves torn out by parliamentary soldiers during the civil wars; the register of Torporley in Cheshire, explains that a breach of five years “hapned by reason of the great wars obliterating memorials, wasting fortunes, and slaughtering persons of all sorts.” The early registers of Christchurch, Hampshire, were found in course of being steadily used up some years since by the curate's wife, who made kettle-holders of them, and who would have consumed, in good time, all the archives if the parish clerk had not interposed. In an Essex parish, the clerk being applied to for a copy of an entry, and not having pen and ink handy, said to the applicant, “You may as well take the leaf as it is,” and cut two whole pages out of the register with his pocket-knife. The old registers supposed in rustic parishes to be “out of date,” have been found snipped into measures by a tailor-clerk, or used for singeing geese, or given by another clerk as parchment to his daughters who were lace-makers. In Northamptonshire, a clergyman discovered at the house of one of his parishioners, an old parchment register sewed together as a covering for the tester of a bedstead. An inhabitant of Lambeth once got a tradesman's package in a leaf of a parish register, and found that it contained the entry of his own baptism.
...
The registers illustrate the not infrequent practice, in days when mortality among the young was even far greater than it now is, of assuring the perpetuation of a father's or mother's Christian name by giving it successively to two or three living children. In the register of Beby, Leicestershire, twins are entered as baptised, one day in fifteen 'fifty-nine, John and John Picke. Two days afterwards, “the same John and John Picke were buried.” There was also one John Barker who had three sons each named John Barker, and two daughters each named Margaret Barker.

From: "All the Year Round", August 30th 1862, pages 591-592
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=W28H ... rs&f=false