Parton Part one, from PastPresented

PAGE 57

THE NOTES:
Overture
& Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Act 4
Act 5
Act 6
Corrections
& updates
Schools extra chapter

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT:
The book "Parton Part one" and the accompanying web pages have been compiled as a first step, to encourage more research on the history of the village. Work began in January 2002, with the intention of finishing principal research at the end of March, and completing the book by the end of April. In practice, research on some topics continued in parallel with the writing throughout most of April, because
a) Some of the existing secondary sources were either puzzling or downright untrustworthy
b) The Lonsdale collection in Carlisle Record Office is a bit mind-boggling:

The big Without Whom...
Although in the book I credited the main institutions holding material used in the research (who get a further thank-you here for their catalogues and indexes), one purpose of these notes is to acknowledge the originators of the many source documents referred to. Even then, however, there remains a third category of contributor, equally important- those who transferred their private archives to public repositories, where they can conveniently be used by historical researchers. These include religious bodies, businesses, societies, individuals and families, but for the purposes of this particular book (and any other about the Whitehaven area) the most important without doubt has been the archive of the Earls of Lonsdale, the Lowther family (documents prefixed CRO D/LONS in these notes). Study of the vast amount of material preserved in the Lonsdale archive over hundreds of years has actually enhanced the status of Whitehaven, and I hope it can do the same for Parton. Also, a special thanks to former Whitehaven librarian and historian Daniel Hay, who collected a wonderful archive of material relating to the town and its surroundings (documents prefixed WRO DH in these notes).

PROBABILITY
Style-checker software would probably find that the word "probably" is one of the most-used words in the book (along with "perhaps", "possibly", "maybe" and other variants). This is a reflection of my irritation on finding that many positive statements by other historical writers are wrong, and almost certainly just educated guesses. Still, you'll probably find some passages where I should have used "probably" but probably forgot.

SPELLING
For the convenience of modern readers, I have "normalised" spelling, and removed superfluous capital letters from quoted text. I have, however, left in archaic and unusual words.

DATES
In the early part of the book, I took some trouble to avoid giving full dates between 1 January and 24 March, because until 1752 New Year's Day was officially 25 March (the supposed anniversary of the day the Virgin Mary became pregnant) so for example 2 January 1696 would come AFTER 30 December 1696. In these notes, that date would be referred to as 2 Jan 1696/7.

ABBREVIATIONS
CWAAS = Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society
References to the CWAAS "Transactions" have the form A-BB, where A is the series number (1 for Old, 2 for New, 3 for Third), BB the volume number
CRO= Cumbria Record Office (Carlisle)
WRO= Cumbria Record Office (Whitehaven)
JLC= the Jackson Library, within Cumbria County Library main branch at Carlisle

In general I have not identified libraries holding copies of printed books; those used were Cumbria County Library at Carlisle, Whitehaven, Workington and Kendal (plus the printed books collection at the Cumbria Record Office in Kendal); Lancashire County Library at Lancaster, and Lancaster University Library.
In addition, I have made use of the Internet catalogue of the Public Record Office (= PRO), but the finances of this project have not permitted me to consult original records there which may throw some light on the hiistory of Parton before 1678