Hooray for Clergy!

Let's give a big "Hooray!" for the clergy! If we're honest, they have saved us major headaches in the research field with their amazing records keeping habits. But they have other records besides just the standard birth, baptism, marriage (including Bans) and death records that could help us out. One of these records is the Visiting Books, which as the name implies would be a record of any visitors to the parish. What would Visiting Books do for genealogy? Say a man married a woman from a community several days journey (which would just be a few hours drive for us today) away and moved her from her family. When her family came to visit, the clergy in the parish would record the names, dates, members of the household and other information. Sometimes even such things as occupations, literacy and occasionally a hand drawn map to their home. --Gayla Mendenhall