Was it normal to change from nonconformist to Church of England?
QI am trying to locate a birth and parents for my 3x great grandfather, Thomas Lamb. He lived in Lambeth, and died in the area in 1821. His nonconformist burial record states that he was born c1789 and was a labourer. He married in 1813 to an Ann Bower, again in Lambeth, and he signed his marriage banns making me believe that he was educated and must have fallen on hard times, as none of his future children could write, and worked as hawkers. In his nonconformist burial record there is also one of his children, who died not long after him. What confuses me is that she was baptised under the Church of England, but buried nonconformist.
Ann Bennett
A Research in the era before the census returns and the (virtually) comprehensive record provided by civil registration frequently throws up problems like this. A man appears somewhere, marries, produces children and then dies, leaving us with practically no clues. His name is relatively common and none of his children have particularly distinctive names. And to cap it all off, he’s described in the few records that we have as a labourer.
The best we can do is draw up a list of all the Thomas Lambs that we can find in the various online databases who might fit the bill. At least in this case we know how old he was, and we can work out that he was born sometime around 1789. A search reveals a relatively large number of potential candidates (half-a-dozen or so), and the task now is to look at each of them one at a time and try to eliminate them. A burial a few weeks after the baptism will of course rule them out, as will the discovery that they were still alive at the time of the 1851 census. If you’re lucky you should be able to narrow the list down to a more manageable number which you can then really start to focus on. It’s important to bear in mind that there are still lots of records that aren’t online, and that some people were never baptised in the first place.
Another approach is to look for other people
‘A record of baptism was evidence of settlement in a particular parish’
called Lamb living in the Lambeth/Southwark area in the early decades of the 19th century. When people moved into the big towns and cities, they often settled close to other relatives. Perhaps one of Thomas’s brothers or sisters married somewhere in the area.
Regarding Thomas’s burial, it’s important to understand that the term ‘nonconformist’ refers to a number of different Protestant denominations, with a wide range of beliefs and practices. The East Street Chapel in Walworth was (and still is) a meeting house belonging to the Baptists, whose belief in adult baptism means that, while there is Newington, contain the baptisms of several children whose burials are recorded at the East Street Chapel. In the period before civil registration was introduced, this was a good way of ensuring there was an official record of a child’s birth.
This would be important for people at all levels of society, from those concerned about inheritance of property to those who were perhaps more worried about the possibility of having to claim poor relief; a record of baptism was admissible as evidence of settlement in a particular parish under the Old Poor Law. Dave Annal