Monday, January 10, 2011

Wedding bells for William

On September 29, 1732, William Savage married Elizabeth Green.  I saw the date on many LDS ancestral file entries, but I needed to verify it.  Luckily, I found a record on Ancestry.com with an image - whoopee.  But when I "googled" the church, All Hallows on the Wall, it looked as if the church wasn't built until 1765.  Yikes, how could my Savage have married in a church that did not exist.  After a bit more digging, I found this history on the church website:

The church of All Hallows London Wall is dedicated to All Hallows (or 'All Saints') and the suffix 'London Wall' describes its location. This was needed to distinguish it from the churches of All Hallows Bread Street, All Hallows Honey Lane, All Hallows the Great, All Hallows the Less, All Hallows Lombard Street, All Hallows Staining (all now gone) and the surviving All Hallows Barking by the Tower - all of them small parishes in medieval London.

That city, now contained geographically within the modern City of London, was surrounded by a wall which had been built by the Romans around 200AD, and the church of All Hallows, in part, stands literally upon that wall.
The present church was designed by the architect George Dance the Younger (son of another architect) and built in 1765-7; it replaced one built around 1300, and there was at least one other before that - the first mention of a church on this site dates from 1120, which it was connected with Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Such a succession of buildings is the usual pattern for churches in the City of London, but All Hallows is unusual in that it was not destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.

In the Second World War the City churches were badly bombed, and many did not survive. All Hallows however, like many others, was restored and is now a Guild Church. This means that it no longer has parish responsibilites, but instead a more specialised function, initially as the headquarters of the Council for the Care of Churches, and now the home of The Amos Trust, Greenbelt, ACE, Stamp Out Poverty and Wallspace.

Here's my William and Elizabeth's marriage record




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