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Settlement and Removal Orders 1690-1849
Background
The Settlement Act of 1662 required each person in England and Wales to have a parish of legal settlement - the only parish in which they were entitled to receive poor relief. This parish was usually a person's place of birth, or where they had lived or worked for at least a year. Legal settlement in a different parish could only be obtained following an examination by the vestry or Justices of the Peace. If successful, a settlement certificate would be granted. If a person required poor relief whilst living in a parish where they did not have legal settlement, the overseers could issue a removal order to have them transferred back to their parish of settlement. The following orders concern the parish of Woodchurch.
Further Information
These records for Woodchurch were transcribed in 2008 by Patricia Chown of the Woodchurch Ancestry Group. Pat transcribed the documents as fully as possible only leaving out unnecessary repetition. There are records for 237 cases, but that may not be the total number of cases for Woodchurch as all the documents read were loose pieces of paper - they were not in a register like the baptisms, marriages and burials. There were 298 documents in total. Some cases had a number of events reflected in different documents. These may not be complete for each case. Finally, and most confusingly, the documents are in no apparent order within each item (section).
The original documents and a film copy are archived at the Centre for Kentish Studies at Maidstone, Kent Their volume listings and item numbers are:
- P400/13/1
- P400/13/2
- P400/13/3
- P400/13/4
- P400/13/5
Within each part, sequential numbers were added by Pat Chown to denote the order of the documents within the item. A simple count from the start of each item will enable researchers to find the film copy of the original.
The best explanation for this element of the Poor Laws is on the following website: