Did they ALL get baptized ?

[Desperate Dan]

I ask the above question because there are some ancestors of mine that just do not appear on the Parish Baptismal Registers of where they claimed to have been born - I know that this may be down to :

a) Amnesia or bloody mindedness when talking to the census people?
b) Belonging to a non-conformist church?, although there is no family history of that in the later past....
c)Transcription errors or any other form of mistake?
d) Perhaps claiming an invented father when born illegitimate?

The possibilities for being missed in research, so far, are many and varied but I still wonder if the Parish Record system captured everybody?

What if they just did not feel the need to support the church?
What if they put it off due to cost and never got around to it?
Was it a legal requirement to be baptised somewhere?
Any comments will be gratefully received.......

[stepives]

There was no legal requirement for baptisms, and pages or records could be lost or destroyed by accident.

In Ireland, for instance, citizens often didn't register their own children's births/marriages as an act of rebellion, even though the law required it.

I think you've answered a lot of your own questions.

Steve.

[MarkJ]

Also remember that they may have been baptised into another religion - e.g Methodism. Not everyone was Church Of England

I come across all sorts of different baptisms - some take place in "job lots", where several siblings are all baptised in one go, with ages from newborn to teenagers! Likewise, some people only feel the need for getting baptised when they want to get married - some old school C Of E vicars would insist that the couple were baptised into the church before marriage....

As Steve says, you have already come up with a good selection of reasons yourself - and baptism was not a legal requirement of course.

[Guy Etchells]

Though there was no legal requirement to baptise there was a legal requirement from1695 to register births.

A fine of 40 shillings was imposed on parents who omitted to give notice within the five days and a similar penalty was payable by the vicar.

A few years earlier The Commonwealth directed “parish registers” to be appointed 22 September 1653.

“…that a true and just account might always be kept, of all marriages, and also of the births of children, and deaths of all sorts of persons within the commonwealth;”

However like many laws since the above was in the main ignored.
Cheers
Guy

[Desperate Dan]

Thanks to all, for confirming what I had suspected....Thanks to Guy for his comment, 40s must have been a LOT of money, back in the day.....
BTW if it was not a baptism, how was it recorded?
NB Your site looks interesting.

[DorothySandra]

Some of the parishes were very small. Sometimes on a census they put the nearest big town, rather than the name of their tiny village.