Castle Hedingham Parish Records

Holly Adams has painstakingly created a catalogue of .xls files (which can be opened by Excel and many other speadsheet programs) based upon her research of Microfiche records at the Essex Record Office. I am extremely grateful to her for making them available to this website, where I hope that they will provide a valuable resource to visitors.

Please bear in mind that these files contain a tremendous amount of data, and some are therefore quite large! I have indicated the file size beside each link; the largest will take several minutes to download if you are still using 56k dial up.

Holly makes the following points -

Sometimes entries are poorly written, and appear to have been entered some time after the event – this particularly applies to those in the mid-C18th. Entries have been copied in the order in which they appear, not in chronological order, so check the dates carefully when looking for something which you believe should be at a certain time. At one point in the burial register, the same dozen or so burials were entered twice on two adjacent pages. By the mid-1730s, either there were very few vital events happening in Castle Hedingham or they weren't being recorded. Perhaps the Sible Hedingham records for that period may show a large number of Castle Hedingham families. Most recent addition is an Excel transcript of the LDS film C067131: births, baptisms & burials (one burial!) from Castle Hedingham Independent Church 1775-1837.

Dates have been converted into New Style dates, with the 1st January being New Year's Day. Prior to 1751, the New Year began on 25th March, so the date 21 February 1748 would be in the final months of 1748 under the Old Style, but be in the first few months of 1749 under the New Style, which we use to this day. The dates are generally written as 21 February 1748/9, but I've opted just to use the New Style. I've indicated throughout where the minister used both OS and NS dates, except in the marriage records.