There are three indexes: Births (containing more than 800 entries), Marriages (containing more than 20,000 entries) and Deaths (containing more than 23,000 entries). They contain all the events in the BMD columns of the Carlisle Journal from 1833 to 1846 but not from any other articles (e.g. Inquests).
The Births index is sorted alphabetically by surname, then chronologically by date of newspaper. The Marriages and Deaths are sorted by surname, then first name, then date of newspaper.
The spelling and information is as printed in the paper, including known mistakes. In addition, there will be typing errors and sometimes transcription mistakes, particularly if the print was faded and difficult to read.
The following information has been included in the index (as long as it was given in the paper):
Births- Family surname in capitals. If only a title was given, then this was used instead of the surname but not capitalised, and in brackets, e.g. the surname of a child of the Marchioness of Abercorn is recorded as (Abercorn). Consequently because of the bracket all the children of titled families will appear at the beginning of the index before A.
- Sex and/or number of children at the birth, e.g. 1M+2F. A stillbirth is in brackets, e.g. (M).
- Date of paper in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
- When born, as stated in the paper – this can be very exact, e.g. “6th Jan last” or very vague, e.g. “lately”.
- Where born.
- Description/name of parent(s), usually in the form of “the wife of George GRAHAM” and any other useful information.
Marriages- Surname. This is in capitals. Titles that are not surnames, e.g. Duke of Buccleugh, have not been capitalised.
- Forenames, as given in the paper.
- Title, e.g. Mr., Mrs., Miss, Esq., Sir, Lord, Earl of.
- Date of paper in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
- Name of Spouse including title (if given).
- When married, as stated in the paper.
- Place of marriage.
- Description of the indexed person. Anything of use to the genealogist has been included unless the amount of information was excessive. Sometimes abbreviations have been used or the information summarised.
Deaths- Surname. This is in capitals. Titles that are not surnames, e.g. Duke of Buccleugh, have not been capitalised.
- Forenames, as given in the paper.
- Title, e.g. Mr., Mrs., Miss, Esq., Sir, Lord, Earl of.
- Age at death.
- Date of paper in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
- When died, as stated in the paper.
- Where died.
- Description of the person. Anything of use to the genealogist has been included unless the amount of information was excessive. Sometimes abbreviations have been used or the information summarised.
The following pieces of information have not been included in the index:- The time of day of an event.
- Name of the officiating minister.
- Whether a marriage was by banns, license, special certificate etc.
- Description of a person’s character and formulaic eulogies like “sincerely regretted by a large circle of friends and acquaintances”.
- Cause and circumstances of death.
Indexing conventions- Information has been indexed as it appears in the paper, including mistakes. Only in the description column has information sometimes been rephrased, shortened or omitted. Some titles have been abbreviated, e.g. Capt. for Captain.
- Ages: A plain number indicates years of age. “In his 79th year” is shown as 79th. For composite ages or age under 1 year, the following abbreviations were used: yrs = years, mths = months, wks = weeks. “Advanced in years” or “at an advanced age” has been abbreviated to “adv”, and “in the prime of life” or “in his prime” to “prime”.
- Women have been recorded by their surname at the time of the event, so “Ann, wife of John GRAHAM and daughter of Mr. SMITH” is only indexed as Ann GRAHAM. The only exceptions to this rule are Scottish women who even as married women are listed in the paper under their maiden name e.g. “Mary GRAHAM wife/widow of John BELL” – they have been indexed under both surnames.
- ·If a paragraph starts by giving a particular place of the event, e.g. “at Whitehaven...” I have assumed that the place of all events in that paragraph is the same (unless stated otherwise).
- The same does not apply to dates – if one event took place on “3rd inst.” and the next one did not give a date, I have left the date of the second event blank. In many cases it may well have been the same date as the previous event – look at the transcription to make up your own mind whether it is safe to make that assumption.
- Remarks by the transcriber are in square brackets.
Other abbreviations used:curt. = current (in this month)
inst. = instant (in this month)
ult. = ultimo (last month)
daur = daughter
Weekdays and months have been abbreviated to their first three letters, e.g. Mon, Tue, Wed and Jan, Feb, Mar.
Other important points- The Carlisle Journal between 1833 and 1846 was always published on a Saturday. This is important to know when working out what date “Tue week” or “Wed last” was.
- The newspaper did not list every single marriage and death in the area – there will be many omissions. And only very few births were listed. An event not appearing in the paper’s BMD column does not prove it didn’t happen.
- On the other hand, some events are listed twice, either in different editions or even in the same column. And details can vary between the different versions.
- Some events were listed many weeks after they happened.
- If you have found a person you were looking for, always look at the actual BMD transcription – there may be more information than is contained in the index.
- Newspapers make mistakes – lots of them. Some are obvious, e.g. getting the “inst.” and “ult.” muddled at the beginning of the month. Others you may only recognise when you corroborate the information from other sources.
- A particular problem is the date of the event as there may be a time lag between the information being given to the paper and it being printed. For example, “Thursday last” should be the Thursday previous to the Saturday when the paper is published but often was in fact the Thursday in the week before. “Friday last” was almost invariably 8 days ago.
- As forenames can be abbreviated, only the initial given or not given at all, make sure when searching for a specific person to look for all the possibilities – Edward SMITH may appear as plain Mr. SMITH, E. SMITH, Edw. SMITH, Edwd. SMITH or Edward SMITH.
- The newspaper uses various ways of spelling surnames starting with “Mc” – most commonly they use M’ but sometimes Mc or Mc. – make sure to check all possibilities. The index ignores apostrophes, so M’INTYRE appears between MINTY and MIREHOUSE.
- Check for variant spellings (or even misspellings) of surnames. Some of them can be quite some distance away in the index. IRVING could appear as IRWIN or IRVINE but also as ERVINE or even URWING. And beware of an extra H at the beginning of a name starting with a vowel, like HOUSBY instead of OUSBY.
- As the paper was published in Carlisle, “this city” refers to Carlisle and “this county” to Cumberland. If only a street name was given but no town, this usually refers to a street in Carlisle or very occasionally to a well-known street in London. “St. Mary’s” and “St. Cuthbert’s” without further localisation refer to the two main parish churches of Carlisle.
- If in doubt about a location (e.g. if there were several places of the same name) look where in the column the notice appears – the Carlisle events were usually listed first, and places close to each other were often grouped together.
The three attachments are available below. Note that the Marriages and Deaths attachments are very large files and will take some time to download especially on slow connections. If your connection is very slow it may time out before the file can download, if this happens you can try again. If it continues to happen please contact the administrator.
