Mallett Surname Origins — 1538 to 1851

The menu items to the left link to a series of pages that discuss the possible origins of the Mallett surname, and the geographical distribution of the name in England and Wales over time. The pages covering the period 1538 to 1837 focus only on the western counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Gloucester, Wiltshire, Warwick, Glamorgan, and Monmouth (The West Country). The information is taken from several sources; most notably the IGI, and the UK 1851 Census of England, Wales and the Channel Islands.

IGI

The IGI (International Genealogical Index) was created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1969 and is available via their "FamilySearch" website.  It contains (primarily) birth and marriage events from all over the world. There are two basic sources of these records. Some have been submitted by individuals over the years, and may be of questionable provenance. The second type of records are those that have resulted from a systematic "extraction" process wherein the birth and marriage events found in parish registers in the UK and elsewhere were transcribed by volunteers and entered into the IGI database.

Only extracted records from the UK are used here. The extraction process, while not perfect, did manage to cover a goodly portion of the British Isles, so these records provide a reasonably accurate snapshot of the time periods covered. The IGI has no time limit, but extracted records for the British Isles effectively begin in 1538 and end in 1836. 1538 is the year that King Henry VIII decreed that every parish church in the realm would begin to record all births, marriages, and deaths in the local parish register, and 1837 marks the year that civil registration began in the UK, taking this responsibilty away from the church. Since the civil registration process was centralized, and produced an index of all records, there was no need to duplicate this effort in the IGI.

It should be noted that though the extraction process was systematic and comprehensive, there are still gaps in the end result. Portions of registers and even entire registers are missing. Oliver's army did a lot of damage to churches during the civil war in the reign of Charles I, and of course through the normal attrition process of fires and floods over the course of 300 years, many parish registers did not survive. Also, in many cases the "extractors" did not have access to the primary record itself. They may have used Bishop's Transcripts, or transcripts made by Genealogical Societies, for instance, increasing the possibility of error and omission.

Mallett Family History is indebted to Hugh Wallis, whose web page entitled “IGI Batch Numbers - British Isles and North America” provided a very helpful tool for searching the online IGI for extracted records, but sadly the site no longer functions properly.

1851 Census

This is a comprehensive snapshot of the the population of England, Wales, and the Channel Islands in 1851.