by Mari Elspeth nic Bryan (Kathleen M. O'Brien)
The source for this list is: Garrett-Pegge, J. W., A Transcript of the First Volume, 1538-1636, of the Parish Register of Chesham, Buckingham County (London: Elliot Stock, 1904), Facsimile Reprint: (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, Inc., 1993)
This transcription was made from the parchment register for Chesham, Buckingham County, England.
Beginning in 1538, parish registers in England were recorded on loose sheets. These are referred to as the paper register. In 1598, the parishes were required to copy the entries from their paper registers into a bound book. These are referred to as the parchment register. Very few paper registers survive today.
Given the small variants of spellings for extremely common names (Elyzabeth, John, William, etc.) in the Chesham register, it seems likely that those names were "standardized" when they were copied into the parchment register in 1598. So some of the spellings listed in this article may only date to 1598 and not the year in which they are listed.
At this time, this list includes only one example of each given name spelling and most surname spellings found between 1538 and 1600/1 inclusive. A future version will include the rest of the surname spellings, frequency information for given names and surnames, and will have related spelling variants grouped together.
Note: Since the new year used to begin on March 25th, the notation 1600/1 indicates the portion of the year that we know as 1601, but was considered 1600 at that time.
© 1999-2001 by Kathleen M. O'Brien. All rights reserved.
Version 1.2, updated 02 January 2000
Published by Arval Benicoeur.