The Bristol chapels

The target: Hannah Saniger, born about 1805–1815, married James Wakefield, and had her first children baptised — somewhere — in Bristol.

When the Registrar General took in the nonconformist registers in 1837 they were bound, numbered and shelved as RG 4. They are the registers of people who did not christen their children in the parish church — Baptists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Moravians, Welsh Calvinistic Methodists — and they are exactly where a Bristol working family of the 1810s is most likely to be found.

This archive's errand list has said for weeks that there were five Bristol chapel registers to read. That was a guess, and it was wrong by a factor of seven. The catalogue holds 36.

36 volumes, 15 chapels

Shaded rows are births or baptisms whose dates cover 1805–1815. catalogue, verbatim

Bristol is not in FreeREG

Before recommending the chapel registers it is worth establishing what the parish registers can do, and the answer turns out to be almost nothing. William and Mary SMITH, across Gloucestershire, for the twenty-one years 1800–1820.

Two hundred and eighty-nine entries, seventy-five parishes, and ONE of them inside Bristol — Stapleton, on the edge of the city, with a single entry. Not one Bristol city parish appears at all. The largest parishes in the result are Dursley (19), Tewkesbury (17), Wotton-under-Edge (17), Ebrington (16), Gloucester (16) — the Vale and the Cotswolds, thoroughly done. The city is missing.

Not present at any size: St Paul · St Philip and Jacob · St James · St Augustine the Less · St Mary Redcliffe · Temple · St Stephen · St Werburgh · St Nicholas · Clifton · Bedminster · Barton Regis.

Bristol is filed under Somerset

Nearly every one of these registers is catalogued "Bristol, … , Somerset". Only Bridge Street Chapel is filed under Gloucester. The city straddles the Avon and therefore the county line, and clerks have been choosing sides ever since.

What to do with this

1. The Anglican registers are not an alternative. Bristol's parish registers exist, and they are filmed — but they are not in the free index, so nothing here can be ruled out by searching it. Any Bristol search from a desk has to be the chapels or nothing. What has actually been read →
2. Twelve volumes, named and numbered — but not free. All twelve were checked one by one against The National Archives' own record details. Every one comes back DIGITISED: FALSE. RG 4 is filmed and published through commercial partners, not free on TNA's website — so these cannot be read from a desk without a subscription, and this archive said the opposite this morning. On the queue, with that correction → Filed →
3. Broad Mead and Lewins Mead first. Broad Mead is the great Bristol Baptist congregation and its births run 1787–1817 in one volume (RG 4/2697); Lewins Mead's Presbyterian baptisms run 1718–1840 in another (RG 4/1830). Between them they cover the whole window twice over.
4. And the honest caveat, which has since been overtaken twice. This said that nothing yet suggested the Sanigers were nonconformist, and that it was where to look because it was where the Anglican registers were not. The first half is now false — the Dursley branch was Congregational for eighty years — and the second half has been tested and answered. Both are set out below. a hypothesis, tested and failed

Answered — and not by reading twelve volumes

The errand assumed these registers would have to be read one at a time, because RG 4 is filmed through commercial partners and not free on The National Archives' site. It did not come to that. FindMyPast carries the RG 4 transcriptions as England & Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms and England & Wales Non-Conformist Burials, and both are searchable by place.

The surname box takes wildcards, so the whole question fits in one query. S*N*G*R at Bristol in the baptism set returns nought — no Saniger, Sanigar, Sinegar, Sinnegar, Sainger, Sanigor or any other form, in any Bristol chapel, in the whole series.

Three controls, same session, same query shape. SMITH at Bristol in that set returns 133 chapel baptisms, Congregational and Presbyterian, between 1724 and 1831 — so the Bristol chapels are indexed. The same wildcard with no place returns 808 — so the wildcard works. And SANIGAR returns 8 — so the surname is in the set. The chapels are there, the name is there, and they do not meet.

The burials say the same thing more usefully still. S*N*G*R at Bristol in the burial set returns nine rows and not one of them is this name: Singer five times, Springer, Stringer twice, Swearenger, Baptist and Presbyterian, 1704 to 1812. A null that returns nine near misses at the right place is about as controlled as a null gets.

documented