Church and Community, Selected records 1540 - 1800 (485)

 Family History Skills & Strategies (Advanced) Distance Learning Course 

Enhance your family history experience by considering the places our ancestors lived in the context of the wider community. This course gives you the tools to understand the nature, jurisdictions and administrations under which different types of community existed in the past, and seeks to bring genealogy and local history closer together. Youve found your ancestor in the parish registers, but was that parish rural or urban, a town or borough? How did that affect your ancestors lives and how will it affect your research? We look at the records of towns, such as burgess rolls, and the difficulties and pitfalls in tracing our early ancestors who migrated from rural areas / parishes to towns.

You will learn about the many records of the diocese and its court, including visitation records, marriage licences and probate records. Also in this category are the records of disputes heard in the church or ecclesiastical courts, often know as bawdy courts due to the nature of cases they heard.

Finally, we look at the records of boroughs in detail, including guilds, freemen, voting rights and merchant guilds.

SET BOOK:
There is a set book which accompanies this course: Angus Winchester, Discovering Parish Boundaries (Shire, 2000). Students are asked to purchase of this before the course starts.
This is readily available from various online bookshops.

• * Introduction to Communities in the Past
• * Details of Parish Life
• * The Diocese and Church Court
• * City and Borough

Each lesson contains exercises and activities and a minimum of one hour chat session per week. See How the Courses Work.

STUDENTS SAID: "The detail and guidance in the course was exceptional and very useful. It may me think about source material and the various records that were created."

"It was interesting learning about the different levels of administration and ecclesiastical set up, and doing the assignment helped with the understanding of different courts and finding records"

ADVANCED PROGRAMME:
This course is part of our Family History Skills and Strategies Advanced programme but can also be taken individually as a standalone course and you may chose whether or not to be assessed. If you are interested in enrolling on our Advanced programme please do not buy the course individually here but see this link for entrance requirements and contact details.

Relevant Countries: England and Wales