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A page from the Salthouse project Book
Buried Parish Registers
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Buried Parish Registers
Location: Norfolk
During the 1939-45 War the Rector buried the parish registers of Salthouse in the churchyard in a misguided effort to preserve them from enemy action. The Norfolk historian, R. W. Ketton-Cremer, described them as ‘little more than a mass of fungus’ when they were dug up five years later.
Commander Stagg, when researching his village history in the 1930s, had access to the parish records before they were buried and made extracts from them that were included in his type-written manuscript. These few extracts do appear in the Salthouse book, which was part of the Salthouse History Group LHI project, but the group was keen to know more about this ‘lump of fungus’, and part of our project was to search out where it was housed in the Record Office, and find out what it really looked like.
The photographs we took show that much of the folios are still readable and, if only they could be restored, would be very valuable to historians and researchers of family histories.
The Salthouse book was so popular that – after everyone in the village and all contributors had had their free copy – it was put on the general market, and made a nice sum of money to be used for another ‘Heritage Project’.
We have chosen to finance the restoration of these records and the Norfolk Record Office has agreed to undertake the challenging job with all the new apparatus available and make ‘a feature’ of it, to begin in June 2005.
Links For more information on this, look at the Salthouse History Website Salthouse Buried and Lost
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