Births and Deaths in Book Trade Families in St Giles Cripplegate, 1653-1681
FAQ:
What the heck is this?
While working on my project about women printers, I ended up spending a vast amount of time compiling a spreadsheet of the births and deaths of every person in a book trade or book-trade-adjacent family who lived in St Giles Cripplegate during 1653-1681. I’ve decided to share it freely here. Please read through these questions before downloading the spreadsheet!
Why are you sharing this?
The way my projects are designed – and the way my mind works in general – produces a ton of raw data like this, and I often think about the fact that somebody else may have already done the labor of collection and just never published it. Which is totally reasonable! But I’ve also benefited from other people’s unpublished resources, either shared privately or posted publicly with incredible generosity, like the late Michael Treadwell’s notes on the book trade. I’m using this data in a very specific way, but there are tons of other researchers who could use it totally differently, in ways that I can’t even imagine. Sharing information enriches our field of study.
Where did this information come from?
I collected this data from the digitized parish records of St Giles Cripplegate, which I accessed through Ancestry.
What exactly does this include?
Pretty unusually, starting around 1653, the parish records of St Giles Cripplegate noted a ton of information, including the father’s profession, the mother’s name, both baptism AND birth dates, and causes of death. So this covers as many records as I could find during the period 1653-1681 of people related to the book trade – primarily printers, stationers, booksellers, and bookbinders, but also cardmakers, type-founders, chapmen, ragmen, peddlers, scriveners, translators, and even inkhorn makers.
Why scriveners? Weren’t they part of a different company by then? What about translators?
Yes, but I wanted to build up the sample size for various reasons of my own, so I’ve left them in for your benefit – do with them what you will!
And inkhorn makers?
Why not? Who wouldn’t want to know how many of those lived in St Giles Cripplegate? The main thing to keep in mind is that this is a work product for me, not a project in itself, so I made it with my own needs in mind, which may at times seem idiosyncratic to you!
Why does it stop at 1681 when it could go through the end of the 17th century? Or at least to 1685, which would be an even three decades?
Because I had neither the time nor the mental energy to do more. And also, eff you, that’s why.
Why didn’t you include marriages?
I refer you to my previous answer.
Where are the limners? What about people involved in paper-making?
Please see yourself out.
Is everything spelled and punctuated and abbreviated exactly the same as the records?
Absolutely not. I’ve expanded or abbreviated words as was convenient or useful for me; I’ve left out lots of punctuation; I’ve modernized the spellings of many names. I haven’t checked all the names against the BBTI, etc, so I might have guessed wrong on the accepted spellings of surnames.
Is it absolutely complete?
I very much doubt it. For one thing, I’m just one person with human eyes, so I’m sure I missed things. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about some professions, like inkhorn makers or translators, from the start, and I don’t have time to recheck for them. Some of the clerks had more legible handwriting than others, and some of the professions are easily mistakable at a glance, particularly depending on the abbreviations used – for example, the parish had a lot of printers, porters, and painters, not to mention cordwainers/cardmakers/carpenters, etc. I also haven’t gone back through it all with a fine-toothed comb to fill in all the gaps where a book-trade profession wasn’t included in the entry. This can affect cases in which the father is already dead: if he died in the plague, then his child died two weeks later, the child is more likely to be identified as “son/daughter of Mother, widow,” and therefore easy for me to miss. So this is very much a caveat emptor situation – if you make use of it in your own research, I strongly recommend double checking specifics and doing additional searches. Please don’t come crying to me in five years if you realize a mistake has ended up in your published work!
Sidenote: this data covers multiple volumes of parish records, and I have not specified the volume each entry comes from or the page it’s on. However, as the volumes are identified by date range, it should be fairly straightforward to match entry to volume. As to pages…sorry, you’re on your own.
I found a mistake/omission! Should I email you about it?
I guess, if it makes you happy? I can’t promise I’ll update it promptly, or necessarily ever – again, this is a work product for me, not a project in itself, but I’ll do my best. Contact me at molly dot yarn at gmail dot com.
What if I want to use it? Should I cite you?
I hope you do use it, and if so, yes, please cite me! Something along the lines of my name (Dr. Molly G. Yarn), a link to the page, and the page title would be fine.
Anything else I should know?
Maybe not specifically, but I would like to mention that I produced this resource during my fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and I’m incredibly grateful to them for funding my work during that time. If you’re interested in this resource, I also refer you to William E. Miller’s journal article “Printers and Stationers in the Parish of St. Giles Cripplegate 1561-1640” [Studies in Bibliography, 19 (1966) 15-38] for supplementary information. I’ve also found Thomas F. Forbes’ “Births and Deaths in a London Parish: The Record from the Registers, 1654-1693 and 1729-1743” extremely useful in understanding the terminology used. I have done a version of this list for births and deaths between 1641-1653 (the years not covered by either my or Miller’s data). I might clean that up and post it later, if people would find it useful.