Find your ancestors in Rugby Baptisms

Discover if your ancestor was baptised in the birth place of rugby. The records will add important details to your family tree; such as, your relative’s place of residence at his/hers birth, parents’ names and even the name of the officiating minister. Baptism records are a unique source for your family history because they date back to centuries before civil registration of births in England.

Each record includes a transcript of the original baptism record. The amount of information in each record can differ depending on the age of the account, but most will include a combination of the following:

• Name
• Birth year
• Baptism date
• Mother’s name
• Father’s name
• Father’s occupation
• Residence
• Place
• County and country
• Description
• Officiating minister
• Record set

Description will usually include the name of the church where the baptism took place.

Discover more about the Rugby Baptisms

The market town of Rugby is located in the County of Warwickshire in the heart of the English Midlands. It is the second largest town in the county and home to the birth of the international sport of rugby. The Rugby Baptisms comprises the whole of the Borough of Rugby, including the towns of Bilton, Hillmorton and Newbold Upon Avon.

The invention of the sport of rugby is accredited to William Webb Ellis at Rugby School, one of England’s oldest independent schools, in 1823. Today the Webb Ellis Cup is awarded to the winning team of the Rugby World Cup.

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer

One notable baptisms within the collection is of Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, an English astronomer credited with discovering and naming the element of Helium on the sun’s atmosphere. He made the discovery a decade before Helium was discovered on Earth. Joseph Lockyer was born 17 May 1836 and we can see from his records that he was baptised on 1 June 1836 at St. Andrews. The records also includes the baptisms of his siblings William and Lucy. His parents were Anne and Joseph Hooley Lockyer. Sir Lockyer inherited his father’s interest in science at a very early age. In his baptism records his father’s occupation is listed as a chemist.

Joseph Lockyer had many accomplishments in his lifetime, he is noted as the father of archaeoastronomy, which is the study of how people understood phenomena in the sky and how that understanding affected their lives. Lockyer first became interested in this study while in Greece in 1890, he observed that ancient temples were aligned along the same axis. He predicted that the positioning of the temples were in relation to the positioning of the rising sun. He later published results of his study in 1894; thus, leading to the beginning of a new field of science. Another accomplishment was the founding of Nature, a scientific journal, in 1869. The journal is still in publication today and is ranked among the tops journals for original research and scientific discoveries.