This subject has continued on Rootschat for over eight years now without any kind of successful outcome, and so, living as I do 400miles away from Ipswich, I would like to join in the common whinge.
My Suffolk interest is in two of the Brady families that resided in Orford and nearby through the XVII century, and very possibly before. I have been fortunate in having had as a skeleton guide a family history written in 1840 by a family member. He had clearly tried to do much parish register research but was frustrated by the apparent lack of diligence by some of the incumbents in performing the tasks of registration with which they were entrusted. On the other hand, he wrote with the advantage of hearsay from older family members, something that is not available to us today, but that is not evidence of the standard now expected.
For some reason there seems to be a particular dearth in the on-line earlier BMD records of Orford, Iken and Sudbourne, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Chillesford and Aldeburgh. Even FreeReg seem not to have been able to put their hands on some of these records yet…if, in fact, they exist! I am trying to see if Charles Brady who died in 1757 purportedly nearly ninety years old might be a son of any of the John Bradys that lived in the area in the late 1600s. To go to Ipswich to spend a couple of weeks trawling over unfamiliar resource, or buying loads of disks, just to see whether any of the records that do exist are relevant seems to me an unreasonable expense.
Does anyone know if the Orford records for this earlier period still exist, who keeps them now and are they copied anywhere else?
