INTRODUCTION
Welcome
to the Sennen "ON LINE PARISH CLERK". web page. This site is for
everyone to enjoy as well to help genealogist, historians, and others with their
family research. Our aim is to provide information on Sennen Parish, the most
westerly in the United Kingdom. We will endeavour to provide a
number of resources, whilst at the same time
hoping that you will share your knowledge with others through the site. We
have transcribed the parish records for the years 1700 onwards and you may browse
at your leisure.
If
you have any queries about these, or the parish in general, please contact
me at the following url..... disguised in order to filter out spam 'bots'.
Cut and paste the address...... replacing <at> with @ .
sandrapenhalvean <at>gmail.com
In the course of my research I have collected mounds of information on the parish and its many 'connected' families and this site attempts to also record something of their life and times. How they lived, worked, loved and died in a parish which is greater than merely the littlest village of Sennen 'Churchtown' or the 'Cove', or indeed the district often referred to as the 'Land's End'.
Those who lived here in the past tended to be multi-skilled: farmer, fishermen, with a touch of miner thrown in. If you had been able to visit at the end of the 18th century and into the 19th you would have found sheep and goats by the thousand grazing the hilly, scrubby, gorse covered land. One thing would also have also been self evident - it was a hard, unforgiving existence and the frequent crop failures meant that smuggling was often resorted to as an alternative source of income Often referred to by those familiar with it as "Free Trade", it was often a blood and brutal business sometimes leading to a hanging, or at best a reprieve with transportation to the colonies, or the option of a life before the mast in the King's Navy [as a legal pirate]. All this and more you will find on the site so please browse away as it will give you an insight as to how maybe your ancestor lived.
The parish borders St Buryan and St Just in Penwith and families tended to frequently stray over these borders. There are OPC [ Online Parish Clerks] for both these parishes, but sadly the original record keeper of St Just was Margaret Owen in Victoria Australia, who is sadly no longer with us. Margaret was Secretary of the Cornish Association of Victoria Inc., Australia, and also the Convener of the St. Just District Research Group, a group within the CAV. Margaret and her friend Alison, who is the Editor/Research Officer of the Group, gathered records for many years. It costs nothing to join the Group, but there is a small charge for research and photocopying expenses. They put people, researching the same names, in the same areas, in touch with one another and these include all the parishes of West Penwith including Marazion, St. Hilary and Perranuthnoe.
You can find a link to the group HERE.
If you need help researching your family and believe they came from, or had links to, Sennen Parish then contact me online as above. If they came from another place in Cornwall then follow the link CORNWALL
You can also find other web sites with a Sennen interest on the LINKS Page
Good Luck with your searches
Sandra Pritchard
OPC Sennen.
