GREAT YARMOUTH BOROUGH COUNCIL, WELFARE DEPARTMENT

Committee Minutes and other records

The Weekly Register Bills listed are returns, submitted each week by the Parish Clerk, Curate or Incumbent of Yarmouth to the Borough Justices, giving details of baptisms, marriages and burials within the parish. No doubt they were used in connection with poor relief and so were transferred by the Justices to the newly-constituted Guardians after 1841. They survive from 1773 but earlier returns must once have existed since the Justices' Order Books (Y/C 12/1-4) contain statistics of burials from 1721. While most of the Bills are firmly dated, the dating of some is open to question and it is possible that these are out of sequence; this is especially true of those between April 1791 and March 1792.

Files Y/WE 310 - 312 are closed to public inspection for 100 years.

Received by norfolk Record Office on 27 May 1963 - 9 June 1964, numbered Y/WE 214 - 246, 254 - 284, 287 and 289 - 295; on 11 September 1964, numbered Y/WE 1 - 213, 247-253, 285-286, 288 and 296 - 297; on 12 January 1977, numbered Y/WE 298 - 300; on 8 December 1976, numbered Y/WE 301 - 309, and on 27 April 1977, numbered Y/WE 310 - 312

Of the records listed the major part were received from the Chief Welfare Officer. some were found among archives received from the Borough Treasurer's Department. Their presence there was due either to shared storage accommodation or to their having been taken over when in 1930 the powers of the Board of Guardians were transferred to the Local Authority. It is impossible to differentiate between these and they are listed here with the other Poor Law records for the sake of convenience. The Poor Rate Books from 1741, probably taken over by the Borough Treasurer when the Overseers' rating powers were transferred to the Local Authority in 1927, are not listed here.

Poor law records prior to 1837 have been received from the Town Clerk's Department (Y/C 12/8-11, Y/C 35/10173, Y/C 41/1-2 and Y/S 10/2) and the Borough Library (Y/L 6/8-11 and Y/D 14/17-18).