>>I did genealogy in the parish registers of London - 1538 to 1660
Awestruck at your incredible opportunity. I love meandering through records and churchyards. Here in MA, the records are kept in the town clerk’s office and were collected into Town Books which were put into almost every town library. But when you really want to be certain, you can go to see the original books with the handwritten wills. Skin chilling thrilling.
Don’t seem to find any Dickinsons in my direct tree. Just an aunt who married into the line in the 1640s in Hatfield MA.
I have multiple newspaper archive subscriptions, so will do occasional searches for people in corners of time.
It really is an adventure... and many of those old registers were written in Middle English script - which requires one to retrain how to read; IIRC, the letter 'c' looked like our 'r', just as an example. I won't even mention the Latin in the Court records of Canterbury, pre-16th century!
***Don’t seem to find any Dickinsons in my direct tree***
My research led up to Samuel Dickinson, a signer of the Constitution... I disproved his published genealogy {about 1900} and I am probably persona non grata in the state of Delaware! 😧 However, it led to a Dickinson family line that settled in western Virginia that were active in the American Revolution... earliest source I could find: St. Martin Orgar's Parish (on the Thames) London, 1645... unsung heroes.