This project intends to transcribe all the surviving documents pertaining to the Primitive Methodist congregations in Colchester and the surrounding villages in north-east Essex for the period approximately 1844 to 1956. These have been deposited in the Essex and Suffolk Record Offices and are currently [February 2007] held at their branches at Colchester, Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds. The Colchester branch is expected to close at the end of March 2007 and the documents are likely to be transferred to Chelmsford. As far as is known, no previous transcription of these records has been undertaken in machine-readable form. In addition to depositing a copy with the UK Data Archive it is intended that copies will be deposited with the respective Record Offices, with the present Colchester Methodist Circuit and with the Essex Society for Family History, thus making these data more easily available to academic, local, religious and family historians. This digital resource aims to reflect the subject content of the traditional archival deposit of records created by the Primitive Methodist circuit and congregations. It is hoped than once complete it will comprise transcriptions of property schedules, registers of baptisms and burials, minutes of meetings, financial accounts, reports, correspondence and preaching plans. This dataset contains a transcription of a baptismal register (identical in format to a post-1813 parish baptismal register) found in the Essex Record Office under the accession number D/NM 2/2/2. Information on when a child was baptised, the childs Christian name, the Parents names (in turn subdivided into Christian and Surname), Abode, Quality, Trade or Profession, and entries of by whom the Ceremony was performed can be found in the dataset. In the original document, there was no column for date of birth but this has been included with the date of baptism in about 35 per cent of cases. Also in the original document, the rows are numbered consecutively and there are 8 rows per page, making a total of 800 printed spaces. However, some rows have been left blank while others have been sub-divided.