St John the Baptist Church - Knutsford, Cheshire, England - Parish records ?
This church appears to have been built c 1780, and extended in the following years.
The registers start in the 1500's so I can only conclude that the burials /graves are at another location.
Could the earlier entries refer to the church of St. Helena at Cross town , a few miles away from the town centre. This was an Elizabethen church that fell into disrepair and was demolished. But—- there are markers and some old grave stones in that location still..
Should the burial references be changed therefor for these early entries ?
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Oh - you got me interested in one of my nearly local parishes…
In order to understand what I think went on, we need to distinguish 2 concepts. Firstly the organisation that we today refer to as the parish church of Knutsford (sometimes we can call it the congregation) and, on the other hand, the physical buildings. Usually we can gloss over the distinction - but not in this case. There also appear to be re-dedications just to confuse matters.
According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knutsford
Knutsford was historically part of the ancient parish of Rostherne. A chapel of ease to serve Knutsford was built in the 14th century on a site to the east of the town near Booths Mere. The chapel was initially dedicated to St Helena and later to St John. In 1741, Knutsford was made a separate parish from Rostherne. [The current] St John the Baptist's Church was built between 1741 and 1744 on a site in the centre of the town to serve as the new parish church, and the old chapel to the east of the town was demolished.
The current St. John the Baptist is on Church Hill, off King St.
The site of the original chapel appears to be next to St. John's Wood School, across the road from Booths Mere - the details are on https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1014378?section=official-list-entry which includes a map. There are, it says, numerous grave slabs from the original building there, though possibly not in their original positions. It also says "It is unclear when it gained its present dedication to St John".
GENUKI has a gazetteer entry for Knutsford on https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/CHS/Knutsford It lists 4 churches at Knutsford - St John the Baptist (the current church), St John the Evangelist (founded in 1855 to the south), St Cross (on Mobberley Rd to the east) and St Helena (which, when you follow the link, has a map showing it to be the original pre-1741 site. It's not a current church and hasn't been since the 1700s. I haven't seen anyone else refer to this old site as St Helena - I suspect they did this for convenience).
So - the organisation / congregation of what is now the parish church starts in the 14th century. It initially used the buildings near Booths Mere. It then moved to a new building in the centre of town on Church Hill. Chester Archives regards this as one "church" under the reference P 7. When the congregation moved to the new building, they would have taken all the registers with them and, organisationally, nothing changed - it was still the same church organisation / congregation.
@Castor1 - I am not certain what the best practice should be for burials from the St. John the Baptist register. In practice, it's the same congregation right through from the 1500s, so I'd be tempted to use St. John the Baptist, which is the description in Cheshire Archives catalogue. (Similarly, I do use St. Matthew's, Haslington, for all events at that place right from the start of its registers in the 1600s even though it moved up the road in the first decade of the 1800s).
If you did want to use a different placename for pre-1744 - well, there isn't one in the FS database at the moment. (Come to that St. John the Baptist is start dated 1744 which doesn't help). You could ask for the creation of St. Helena and use that as the place for events prior to 1744, especially including burials, but I'd be a bit wary as there's always an overlap in my experience with new graves on the new sites but further burials in existing graves on the old site continuing for a while. (This happened in Nantwich when they opened an overflow graveyeard down the road - lots of burials in an overlap cannot be assigned with confidence to one site or the other).
Churches moving their physical does happen - more often than you might think. Because the registers tend not to change, I usually content myself with a note to say "Probably on the old site at XXX".
Phew… You may consider yourself "better informed but no wiser" as we say.
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@Castor1 I haven't done much research in Cheshire so I can only speak as a genealogist. According to all the sources I looked at the church was built in 1744. It would not be correct to use St John the Baptist for burials before that date. Without having proof that the earlier records were for the Church of St. Helena, I think I would just use the parish of Knutsford as the burial place.
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Thank you - thats the most comprehensive result i have received. These days one tends to think of a church as being a building, but as you so rightly point out - the church is the people. So I guess they just took all the documents with them and became St Johns.
I dont think they every knew how many graves were left in the decaying churchyard at St Helenas. And no doubt the lettering on the stones has now gone. My ancester was a Richard Massey - a farmer at Ollerton from 1756 to at least 1775, when his wife Sarah Cherry was buried at St Johns ? I have never found found his burial. The site of St Helenas at Cross Town, would have been more convient I suppose to Ollerton ,and they had connections to the Booths ——but another vague historical factor.
thank you for your reply -really interesting and helpful
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