Are the Early Records in the North Riding Register of Deeds Useful as a Source for Historians? A Case Study of Six Parishes in the Period 1736 to 1756.
Creators: name: Ryan, Catherine Ann
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Local history
subject: History
subject: Eighteenth century
subject: Great Britain
subject: Records--Management

description: The North Riding Registry of Deeds (NRRD), which was established in 1736, holds memorials (copies of the deeds, sometimes giving only brief details) of many property transactions from that date until 1970. The memorials are sometimes difficult to understand because of the legal language used within them, and the type of transaction can be hard to ascertain. However, they contain a wealth of information about people and their social history, especially important before registrations of births, marriages and deaths and the Victorian Censuses. When used with other documentation from the time, such as parish registers and wills, they can be invaluable in tracking people's movement from one area to another and in tracing inheritances, particularly those through the female line. They can also be used to examine links between communities and people who were unrelated.

Other Deeds Registries in the UK and Ireland have been used in histories of their localities and in family history research, but the NRRD has only recently been considered in an academic study over the whole county, focussing on women's involvement in property transactions. This study has concentrated on six parishes (Barningham, Boldron, Bowes, Brignall, Rokeby and Startforth) over a twenty-year time period at the start of operation of the Deeds Register. These parishes have been overlooked by many previous histories of the area and this thesis aims to at least partly redress this omission. There were 342 memorials registered for these six parishes between 1736 and 1756, and these contained nearly 2,000 names of people who were either parties to the transactions or witnesses (many more were named as tenants or neighbours, but these were not analysed in this study).
description: The North Riding Registry of Deeds (NRRD), which was established in 1736, holds memorials (copies of the deeds, sometimes giving only brief details) of many property transactions from that date until 1970. The memorials are sometimes difficult to understand because of the legal language used within them, and the type of transaction can be hard to ascertain. However, they contain a wealth of information about people and their social history, especially important before registrations of births, marriages and deaths and the Victorian Censuses. When used with other documentation from the time, such as parish registers and wills, they can be invaluable in tracking people's movement from one area to another and in tracing inheritances, particularly those through the female line. They can also be used to examine links between communities and people who were unrelated. Other Deeds Registries in the UK and Ireland have been used in histories of their localities and in family history research, but the NRRD has only recently been considered in an academic study over the whole county, focussing on women's involvement in property transactions. This study has concentrated on six parishes (Barningham, Boldron, Bowes, Brignall, Rokeby and Startforth) over a twenty-year time period at the start of operation of the Deeds Register. These parishes have been overlooked by many previous histories of the area and this thesis aims to at least partly redress this omission. There were 342 memorials registered for these six parishes between 1736 and 1756, and these contained nearly 2,000 names of people who were either parties to the transactions or witnesses (many more were named as tenants or neighbours, but these were not analysed in this study).