Website problems

I have just been able to access a computer, and see that the website is having some problems. Stand by, hopefully it will be fixed soon.

In other news, no white Christmas for me - but some lovely frosts so I have some pretty photos nonetheless. Hope you all had a good Christmas!

Family Traditions

Christmas in NZ generally consists of gathering around the BBQ with family and friends, and ensuring you are well coated with sunblock in case you catch too much sun while eating steak and sausages! And Skyping those relatives overseas of course, to wish them a Merry Christmas and tell them how sunny it is!

In Wing this would have been a bit different - less sun, less heat, but probably still a comparatively bountiful feast. And their family were likely mostly in the immediate vicinity, not scattered around the globe.

This year I'm turning things upside down and heading north to the other side of the globe, Shropshire to be precise, to spend Christmas with my grandfather and brother. I've been keeping a dubious eye on the temperatures, and I hope I will at least see some impressive frosts and snow to compensate for not being able to feel my toes.

I hope that, wherever you are, you too will be able to spend time with your family and friends enjoying a few days off.

The next update to the website will probably be around 7 January, once I'm back in NZ and had a chance to fully defrost!

Just testing

Just testing remote blogging....Anyone else with ancestors working as gardeners at Ascott? Keep 'em coming!

Ascott House gardeners

I think I'm going mad.........I'm sure someone emailed me a while back whose ancestor was a gardener at Ascott House, but I can't find the email now. Assuming I didn't imagine it and whoever it was is reading this, can you please email me again? Thanks!

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

I'll be in the UK for Christmas this year, so if you all dream along with me maybe it'll come true! Just a light smattering to make everything pretty, not enough to interrupt travel plans, that'll do nicely.

Fox Hunt

Sometimes names change slightly between directories - for example a first name might be revealed whereas in a previous directory it had an initial only.

However in the 1928 Kellys directory, the 1st whip at Ascott, William Bodington, appear to have suddenly acquired the middle name "Faux" - did he pronounce this Fox perhaps? Looks like this might be an affectation rather than a name he was born with...

Ancestry.com US passport applications

There's a Harry George CHAPPEL born in Wing that is listed as applying for a US passport in Ancestry.com's new US Passport Applications 1795-1925 database.

Unfortunately my subscription is to the UK site and only covers UK databases so I can't see the full entry. *sigh*

December update

There's a new directory as promised this month - the 1928 Kellys directory. This is four years later than the most recent directory I had previously transcribed, so those of you with relatives in Wing prior to WWII will be keen to see this one I'm sure.

Motor omnibus

You'll be delighted to know that by 1928 motor omnibuses now passed through Wing, ready to transport our (relatively recent) ancestors to Leighton Buzzard, Winslow and Aylesbury!

I'm transcribing the 1928 Kelly's directory. Four years earlier the directory made no mention of such exciting conveyances. I assume carriers William BONE and Mrs Julia LOVELL were still doing things the old fashioned way though.

Military men

It seems to me that the Military Men page is getting a bit unwieldy, so I'm going to be reorganising it over the next wee while - it's getting busy already in the leadup to Christmas so I can't guarantee you'll see the revamped pages until early next year! I'm planning to have separate pages for those men serving in WWI, WWII, then all the others. I think that'll strike the right balance between having room to move and not having to look at too many pages in search of men from your families.

This does of course mean I'll have a bit more space to expand on each entry - if I have the information to hand - so if you have something to add on any of the men please let me know.

Incidentally I'm feeling very "vintage" at the moment, reading books about the RAF in WWII and, on a more girly note, learning all about hairstyles of that era (yes I am too young to have been there done that). My first attempt at pincurls certainly attracted attention at work today!

Isn't it ironic

I've been busily working on transcribing the next volume of baptisms for the website. These cover the 1837 to 1869 period - 1216 entries so it's taking a while! I had transcribed them all, and was about an hour's worth of time away from finishing checking them, but alas someone else has ordered the film so it's had to be sent back and my little project will have to wait until next year!

So if you'd just ordered 1042446 through your local LDS family history centre, hello there and I hope you find what you're looking for!

I won't be putting the transcriptions up on the website until they're checked but I'm happy to do lookups in it in the meantime, so feel free to email me about baptisms 1837 to 1869 (or burials 1833 to 1845 as I also have those transcribed but unchecked).

November update

This month there's a number of small additions scattered over the website:

Military Men:
* a link to Project Gutenberg's copy of The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
* new listings for John BANDY alias MAYNE, Frederick Arthur HOWCUTT, Edwin JORDAN, Edwin RANDALL, Thomas ROWE, George SAUNDERS and Frederick WOOLHEAD
* updates to Albert BANDY, Albert BRAND, James BURROWS, Arthur CUTLER, William George PEASE and William WOOLHEAD

Some other pages have been updated thanks to the useful information found in the War Office 364 series, notably:

Baptist: Frederick WOOLHEAD (also a link to the obituary of Hannah HELEY in the Baptist Magazine)
Wesleyan Methodist: William WOOLHEAD
Catholic: Thomas ROWE (not that the Catholic page is up on the website yet as it's a bit short of information - does anyone have anything they can contribute?)

The DORMER page has been updated to include the charming epitaph for Magdalen Dormer from St Mary the Virgin in Waterperry Oxfordshire.

I haven't yet found a suitable place to record William WOOLHEAD's interesting tattoos though - there may not be enough of our Wing ancestors with body art to warrant its own page! I'd be intrigued to be proved wrong though.....

Zelinda

On 4 Dec 1859 William and Martha DIMMOCK of Littleworth baptised their new daughter Emmiline Zelinda. This obviously sounded like a nice name to Bernard and Dinah BOLTON (also living in Littleworth), whose daughter Minnie was being baptised on the same day and was also given the middle name Zelinda!

Apparently it's Italian in origin. Has anyone got any theories as to how those in Wing came to hear of it?

Delete buttons are dangerous

USB drives are great - except for the fact they don't have recycle bins, which means if you have accidentally highlighted a whole directory instead of the one file you wanted everything goes into the great digital recycle bin in the sky.

If you are stupid enough to compound this distressing event by using a file recovery program to restore one of those files to the original directory name, and forgetting in your panic that this eliminates your chances of subsequently getting back any of the other files that would have been in that directory, you can't really do anything but kick yourself (and cry quietly to your blog).

Suffice to say, my transcription of the 1891 census is safely recovered but everything else in my "genealogical working directory" that I had worked on over the last couple of days is gone.

Out of steam

I'm up to 1848 in the baptisms, but the enthusiasm is starting to wane a bit......376 entries down, only 840 in this volume to go!

Big days for baptisms

I managed to transcribe another year of baptisms this week - yes, only a single year's worth! I blame curate John Felix though. It's not like he let things slide and had to do a big catchup that year, but for some reason on 25 Jun 1837 he baptised 16 people, then the following Sunday 2 July another 25!

This coincides with the introduction of civil registration on 1 July that year - but I suspect that this isn't actually just coincidence. I wonder what conversations were being held in Wing around this time!

October update

Another month, another update, and it's another big one! The first batch of 800 baptisms have been transcribed, these cover the years 1813 to 1836 inclusive - as with last month's burials, you may want to check the sitemap for links to individual years. And as I've previously mentioned, around 25% of these are NOT in the IGI extracted batch for this period so I'm hoping that some of you will be able to solve some mysteries (or maybe inadvertently shake your existing tree).

I've also made some minor changes to the Methodist page (thanks to Ewart Tearle who has allowed me to use his photo of the old Primitive Methodist Chapel building), and the links page - some of the linked pages had moved on but I've managed to track them all down again now.

Now I'm off to doublecheck that all those baptisms are correctly reflected in my own tree!

A HARDWICK connection

Over the last week a couple of new-to-me Wing researchers have gotten in touch - hi there! One was even connected to my own HARDWICK line which was really nice. Is there anyone else out there with a Hardwick connection, or an interest in PAGE, BONHAM or WOODRUFF? Or anyone else who is finding the information in the Wing One Place Study useful and hasn't emailed me to introduce themselves? I'd love to hear from you, if I know you're out there and which families you are researching I may be able to put you in touch with other people working on the same family.

Parish Registers vs Bishops Transcripts

I mentioned bishops transcripts a few blog posts ago. Newbies might appreciate knowing a bit more about bishops transcripts, and how they differ from parish registers.

Parish registers are the primary source of information about key life events that took place within the parish church (baptisms, marriages and burials). Exactly what information was recorded about these events depends on the timeframe it occurred (generally the later it was the more information you will get) and the clergyman involved in recording the entry. Some vicars were more conscientious about recordkeeping than others, and some were simply more opinionated than others! The vicars of Wing were generally pretty good with recordkeeping and there are certainly comments and other pieces of information over and above the norm scattered throughout the parish registers.

In order to gain more visibility about what was going on at parish level, each diocese requested that an exact copy of the records be made each year and sent in to them. These were known as bishops transcripts. While they are supposed to be an exact copy, obviously mistakes and omissions may have occurred in preparing the transcript each year. On a happier note, if the original parish records were subsequently damaged or lost the bishops transcripts can act as a replacement source of information for genealogists. It may not be apparent from the parish records that such a loss has occurred, so if you are looking for a particular entry in the parish registers and don't find it you should probably also check the bishops transcripts if available, on the offchance that the entry does exist there.

The practice of making bishops transcripts ran up until 1837 when civil registration came in. Wing's surviving bishops transcripts run from 1600 to 1842 with some gaps, most notably the 1672 to 1701 period.

The reason I used bishops transcripts in my comparison with the IGI baptisms was simply because I happened to have them at hand, as I was checking to make sure there wasn't a missing marriage for one of my MUNDAYs in there. I'm now transcribing the actual parish registers for baptisms for that same period, so can report that the BTs and the PRs are fairly consistent with each other. There is the odd entry missed out from the BTs, a few dates (generally the month for some reason) recorded differently, and minor spelling variations (Anne vs Ann, or Ascott vs Ascot) but definitely much less variation between the PRs and the BTs than there was between the BTs and the IGI!

September update

Only one update this month, but it's a goodie! The 803 burials in Wing from 1846 to 1874 inclusive have now been transcribed and are on the website.

Don't forget about the sitemap on the website, which has a direct link to every individual page on the site. You can find the link to the sitemap at the bottom of the right-hand column on the homepage, and once there you can click through directly to any of the new years of burials.

Transcriptions of all the burials from the start of the Wing parish registers in 1546 through to 1909 are now readily available as follows:
1546 to 1782 - in the Woodman transcripts (available on CD from S&N Genealogy Supplies)
1783 to 1812 - on my website
1813 to 1845 - in the National Burial Index (available on CD from FFHS)
1846 to 1909 - on my website

I won't be getting around to transcribing either the 1813 to 1845 period or the pre 1782 period of burials any time soon - given the deficiences in the IGI extracted batches for baptisms I'll probably turn my attention to getting complete transcriptions of the baptisms next! They're much slower going than burials though......

Handy Hints - historical directories

Surviving historical directories generally start from around the 1840s (they're pretty scarce before that point) and stretch on into the 1900s. In the earlier days they obviously weren't needed for either phone number or address purposes, except in the larger towns - in the villages everyone knew where everyone lived! For genealogists today they are a great resource for understanding a village.

From them you'll be able to establish the relative size of the town or village you are interested in, churches and other key places within the village, local transportation, notable events (eg the town being destroyed by fire or ravaged by smallpox) and key residents. Note that not everyone will be included, generally just notable families and tradesmen, and some places are too small to warrant their own entry.

I've transcribed the entries for Wing for all the directories I've been able to get my hands on (further contributions always welcome). If you are looking for someone in particular, there's also a cross-referenced index of names found in those directories, otherwise just browse by year from the home page to get a feel for Wing at any given time.

A fabulous website is www.historicaldirectories.org, where a collection of English and Welsh directories have been scanned and made freely available for viewing (you can also save individual pages to PDF) by the University of Leicester. The original commitment was to have these on the web until October 2007 - there's no word yet as to whether this will be extended, so now would be a good time to research the villages found in your family tree. I've just made some interesting new discoveries, like my cabinet-maker great-great-grandfather also being listed as an auctioneer in Blandford Dorset in 1842.

Oh so quiet

Between the Northern Hemisphere enjoying their summer holidays and the Southern Hemisphere hibernating, it seems a bit quiet on the genealogical front at the moment. My email inbox has all but dried up this month (apart from the spam of course). I've been working away on getting some more Wing burials transcribed, and it does look hopeful that they might be ready in time for the September website update - just as well, as I haven't prepared anything else this time around!

Handy Hints - IGI

Genealogist newbies might appreciate the odd handy hint and useful tidbit of information about sources and "best practice". Comparing the Wing data in the International Genealogical Index (IGI) with the actual data from parish registers proved quite illuminating, so here are some things you might like to know.

By way of background, entries in the IGI all have a batch number. Those that are noted as being "extracted batches" have been indexed by the LDS church from the parish records of the place in question. Conventional wisdom says these extracted entries are fairly reliable, while other entries which have been submitted by individuals can be fairly unreliable.

I have compared the baptism entries from the IGI batch C014632 for Wing with the bishop's transcripts for Wing for the years 1813 to 1816 inclusive. Here are some conclusions -

* If an entry is in the IGI, the details you can see for that entry are more than likely correct (ie no errors have probably been made in either the names or dates)

* However this does not mean that all the information in that original entry is included on the IGI. For example, at this time the parish registers will also tell you the abode - limited to village/hamlet - of the family (eg Thomas and Susannah BRASINGTON were living in Crafton when they baptised Sarah Bailey Brasington in 1813), the occupation of the father (eg John FOSTER is listed as a blacksmith when daughter Mary was baptised in 1814), and the name of the minister who performed the baptism. You may also get other non-standard pieces of information, like the fact two children baptised on the same day with the same parents were definitely twins!

* There may be further entries in the parish registers that have been missed out altogether in the extracted batches for the IGI. In the four years from 1813 to 1816, 37 of the 135 baptisms are missing - that's a whopping 27% of the entries you might have been looking for! So if you are connected to the Adams, Bailey, Bandy, Bolton, Bone, Brasington, Capp, Cheshire, Denchfield, Dimmock, Dollimer, Foster, Haggis, Hedges, Holyman, Jennings, Loe, Luck, Mead, Page, Pollard, Robbins, Rose, Simmons, Smelt, Staples, Steel, Woodman, Woolhead or Woster families, and have tried to construct your family tree over this period solely using the IGI, you definitely have some people missing (and perhaps even twins).

While the IGI is a great (and free!) resource, it should not be used in isolation to research or support your genealogy. It's an index only - and as we have seen, it is not necessarily a complete one. Your aim should always be to use original sources where possible.

The IGI can be accessed on the LDS website here:
IGI

Extracted batch numbers for Wing are:
P014631 - baptisms 1546-1812 (and a few burials)
C014632 - baptisms 1813-1870
C014633 - baptisms 1870-1881
M014631 - marriages 1546-1812
M014632 - marriages 1813-1881

New computer

We have a new computer, complete with Vista and the latest version of Outlook. Email might therefore be a bit dodgy for the next few days while I get everything set up, so if you don't hear from me immediately, please be patient, I may be experiencing technical difficulties!

As always, you'll have a lesser chance of getting trapped by my spam filters if you have a relevant subject line, like "POLLARD in Wing".

Cow Leech

In times past, a man described as a doctor would be quite different from what we now think of as a doctor, as the practice of medicine and the required skills and training have progressed immensely in recent times. Similarly, way back when our ancestors were around, there weren't really veterinarians as we know them today. But there were certainly cows, and things did go wrong with them. That would be when you called upon the cow leech (or cow leach) - those that practised the "cow lore", using herbal medicines and practices that no doubt hurt as often as they healed. Apparently cow leeches were not particularly highly regarded, the "quacks" of cow medicine you might say.

My Jeremiah POLLARD who came to Wing c.1725 was noted as a cow leach in his marriage entry in Aylesbury, hence the interest. I'm also connected to the IMPEYs of Bierton, one of whom is one of the three cow leeches listed in the Posse Comitatus of 1798.

Anyone know anything more about what a cow leech did?

The "Negro from Egypt"

Oh no! Yesterday evening I was all set, ready for two hours of transcribing burials for the 1846 to 1873 period, but alas! While I had ordered the right film number, and the box had the right film number on it, the actual film inside wasn't the right one.........

So while that gets sorted out, I'm looking at some of the bishops transcripts instead. Found an interesting entry I wasn't expecting in 1815 - the baptism of a "Negro from Egypt" who was a servant of the vicar's. My tired eyes were having trouble making out the name on the BTs but according to the IGI transcripts he (she?) is Abderazak Ibrim.

The slave trade had been banned in England in March 1807. Had this servant come in to England as a slave originally, or were they a recent arrival who had always enjoyed a standard employment arrangement? That's one topic I wasn't expecting to have to research in connection with Wing!

August update

New to the website this month is a summary of the brickmaking industry in Wing. It seems that most of the brickmakers themselves were "imports" from elsewhere, but a few were local and the brickmaking process and business makes for an interesting read.

Also (mostly) new this month are jury lists. There always were a couple of jury lists included on the Crime page, but I now have lists for more than a dozen new years in the late 1700s so they've been given their own separate page.

You'll also find a few more marriage strays that fellow researchers have submitted - keep them coming!

My people

This week I've been updating my own tree. I realised there's a fair amount of research I've completed on some of the Wing families that happen to be my own family, and I haven't necessarily transferred all the information on those that are directly related to me into my own Personal Ancestral File database, so I'm tidying that up. I'm also putting together a plan of attack to see if I can finally track those ancestors that don't seem to have been born in Wing. Next stop Waddesdon and Aylesbury records!

WORSTER and HARRIS

I''m still looking at the brickmaking industry in Wing. It seems the founder of the Littleworth brickworks, Richard HARRIS, didn't have any children so I think it is likely that his WORSTER nephews may have been the main beneficiaries of his will when he died in 1870. Any WORSTER/WOSTER/WORCESTER descendants out there with a copy of this will (or happy to get a copy to check it out?). Richard was both a farmer and miller as well as brickworks owner, so he likely had a reasonably large estate.

July update

The Wing One Place Study has been updated for July. Quite a lot of individual pages have new snippets of information added, and there's a couple of new pages.

* Researching before 1546, when the parish registers began
* Feet of Fines for Wing
* a new will extract (Henry STRATFOLD who owned land in Wing)
* a new link (to a CULVERHOUSE one name study)
* a new marriage stray (REEVES in Buckingham)
* a new bankruptcy for the Miscellany (George HEADY, one of Wing's straw dealers)

I've also made some small updates to the Non-Conformist pages (added a photo of the Union Chapel, a note about a collection amongst the Burcott Baptists, a link to an interesting Primitive Methodist book on Google books, and a few other Primitive Methodist snippets).

Feeling the cold

Here in NZ it's been too cold over the last week to spend much time sitting at the computer - been feeling very sympathetic towards our poor ag lab ancestors who must have had much less pleasant living conditions over winter.

Brickmakers

A descendant of the GODMAN family recently contacted me - they were brickmakers so it's prompted me to look at brickmaking in Wing. Perhaps you can help?

* Any descendants of Richard HARRIS, George TRUEMAN, or Laurence FAULKNER out there?

* Does anyone have any photos of the brickworks at Littleworth, or of anyone known to have worked there?

* Does anyone know when the yard finally closed? And does anyone have any snippets of evidence to suggest there was brickmakers or brickmaking in Wing prior to 1859?

* It would be nice to have a photo (old or new) of a building in Wing known to be made of bricks from the Littleworth brickworks - I dare say there are probably a lot that fall into this category.

Robert VALLENTINE's prize essay

Anyone keen to learn about the retention of moisture in turnip land? Then you'll want to check out the essay by Robert VALLENTINE of Burcott Farm published in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1856. Unfortunately one of the pages is blurry so some of the wisdom of his 20 years experience in growing turnips is lost, but an entertaining read none-the-less!

You can also check out page 269 of the same book for a much longer (54 page) article about farming in Buckinghamshire at this time. My poor printer isn't thanking me, but I'm off to snuggle up in front of the heater and extend my knowledge of Bucks agriculture!

Online books

If you want to flesh out the lives of your ancestors, historical books are a good place to start. Both Google and Microsoft are making books available online, not a completely new concept but now easy to search and in some cases fully downloadable in PDF form to read at your leisure. The books each have scanned to date are quite different, so be sure to check out both sites if you are hunting for information, say on ag labs in Bucks.

Google Books (my find this morning - English Agriculture in 1850-51 by James Cain, published 1852)

Live Search Books (my find this morning - The Village Labourer 1760-1832 by JL Hammond and Barbara Hammond, published 1911)

If you find something interesting, leave a comment with the details!

June update

New for this month is marriage strays. Did your ancestor acquire a wife or husband from parts unknown? Perhaps their marriage took place in one of the other parishes covered in the Phillimores transcriptions (which generally ran up to around 1812), and if so you will hopefully find them on my new marriage strays page.

I have also updated the Non-conformist and Methodist pages as we have been able to identify the BRAND family as Primitive Methodist - thanks for the information Bert!

And lastly I have added a link to the TYRRELL Family History Society - as I type this their website appears to be down but it definitely exists so keep trying if you are having problems.

Back to the 1891 census

I've turned my attention back to the 1891 census transcription for Wing - it really is time to just get it finished, don't you think? I'm two-thirds of the way through it, that's almost 1200 people out of 1800.

A couple of pages I transcribed this week have some interesting non-conformist entries on it. The Primitive (Methodist) Chapel is listed, with no occupants but with the known Methodist families of GUESS and WOODWARDS living next door. And James and Kate HELEY, who were connected to the Congregational Union chapel, have an evangelist as a visitor in their home on census night. This is the same Kate HELEY who penned a notebook entitled "Scraps and Incidents and Notes of the Lord's Dealings" covering the decade before (this can be found at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies). I'd love to read that!

Ascott House

I was browsing our local paper online this morning, and there was a brief mention of Ascott House.....apparently one of the Rothschild family owns a property in NZ which is being developed as an organic farm!

David de Rothschild's Banks Peninsula farm

No Quakers in Wing

It's official. I've checked the Buckinghamshire digests of the Quaker registers for births, marriages and deaths to 1837, and there's no one from Wing listed.

Practical Family History magazine

The April issue of Practical Family History has just arrived here in NZ. It has an article on Finding Your Forebears in Buckinghamshire by Alan Stewart, which was kind enough to mention the Wing One Place Study - thanks Alan!

If you missed this issue, you can order a copy direct from the publishers at ABM Publishing.

Photo pages update

I haven't added any new photos, but the three pages that consist primarily of photos of modern-day Wing (Photos 2005, All Saints Church 2005, and the Wing War Memorial) have now been converted so they look the same as the rest of the website.

May update

The new pages for May are all about non-conformists in Wing - the chapels that existed, the records that are available, along with transcriptions of some of the source records and other snippets that may include one of your surnames! Non-conformity almost seems to be the norm in Wing judging by the numbers attending those chapels, so more than likely there will be a branch of your tree in there somewhere.

If you have anything else to contribute to the non-conformist pages, perhaps some evidence that your ancestor was also non-conformist, please let me know.

Another BECKETT tragedy

You may remember the sad case of Maria BECKETT who killed her granddaughter in Dec 1856 while of unsound mind (story here). I've just found another sad story for the Beckett family, four years after this event. One of Maria's sons, Jesse, was "killed by a horse" in January 1861 according to the records of the Lake Street Baptist Church in Leighton Buzzard who counted the Becketts among their members. Jesse was 25.

Non-conformist marriages post-1837

Does anyone have any marriage certificates of their Wing ancestors that indicate the wedding took place in a non-conformist chapel? I'd be interested to know if any of the local chapels were licenced.

Wing War Memorial Restoration Fund

Those of you who have been fortunate enough to visit Wing in recent years will be aware that the War Memorial is not in the best condition. Restoring it before the damage cannot be undone is a specialist and costly exercise.

A Wing resident, Mark Woolhead, will be cycling a stage of the Amstel Gold Tour in Holland next weekend to raise funds for this. Visit the Wing Village website, head to the Notice Board then click on the link to learn more. And please contribute a donation!

(If there's anyone in NZ wanting to donate but with logistical difficulties in providing UK funds, please email me - I'll be organising a UK cheque to send over to them and am happy to add your own donation in with mine)

In search of Baptists

It seems very quiet out there, I haven't even had much spam email lately! What's everyone else researching at the moment? I'm waiting on a film of Baptist records to arrive at my local LDS Family History Centre so I can continue looking at non-conformists in Wing.

BMDshare.com

Like me, you're probably subscribed to several different Rootsweb mailing lists. I've seen the website BMDshare.com mentioned a few times lately on different lists, and I finally found a few minutes to check it out. It's a place where you can contribute information found on birth, marriage and death certificates you may have in your collection, and of course search to see what has been contributed that might be of use to you! You can search by any field that is found on the certificate (hurrah), and the site is very quick and easy to use. No Wing people there yet though - perhaps we should all contribute some!

April update

Brand new this month is:

Wing's Neighbours - some suggestions of where to start looking for your ancestors before and after their time in Wing. I realised I needed to make a list like this to add some structure for hunting down my own families, and hopefully it will be useful for everyone else out there as well. I've added links to websites that include any reasonable amounts of genealogical data for those particular villages.

Also some updates to the following pages:

Links - new pages for FOSKETT and TEARLE surnames, and a few links for Wing's neighbours that weren't relevant for the new page above but are a very interesting read nonetheless.

Military men - added BEILBY, BURROWS and expanded info for BOCK found in the War Office 364 series (the Unburnt Records, which are excellent if your ancestor happens to be one of the less than 10% included in this series!), plus a new link about the Wing airfield during WWII.

Miscellany - four new snippets here

and last but not least, Will Extracts - new entries for BISHOP, BRANDON, FFYNES, LUCAS, MORTIMER and PAINE. If you have some more tucked away amongst your research, please forward the info to me, either the will itself or your transcript or extract from it.

Marriages

All the existing marriage pages (covering 1749 to 1783) have now been converted to the new format.

FOSKETT

Sandra has put her one-name study of FOSKETT online - if you have Fosketts it's well worth a visit.
www.foskett-genealogy.co.uk

In other matters, last call for any wills you may want to share....over the next couple of days I'll be finishing off the pages for the April update to the website.

Wills

I'm updating the wills pages with half a dozen new wills that fellow genealogists out there have provided. Do you have a will for one of your Wing family that you could share? I'm happy to receive either copies of the will, or transcriptions of it!

WW1 pensions

Ancestry have been busy scanning the so-called "Burnt Records", the War Office series of surviving pension records from WW1. It's a work in progress, but the documents themselves are very interesting should you be lucky enough to find one you are interested in. A search tip - there's some pretty interesting mistranscriptions of birth parishes, but luckily the names themselves are quite a bit better, probably because each file has the name recorded several times in different handwriting so between them it's easy to get it right! "Wing" isn't usually mistranscribed, but there's a man from "Wine Buckinghamshire" who might end up being of interest to me......

No March update

I've had such a busy February I haven't had a chance to finalise anything new for the website. I did get all the banns converted to the new format, ditto the 1841 and 1871 census which went up on the site yesterday. There's still a few more pages to convert to the new look (most notably the marriages), so those should appear over the next few weeks.

New bits waiting in the wings that didn't quite get finished in Feb are that pesky 1891 census, new pages about non-conformity in Wing including the people listed on the Methodist Roll of 1898, a few more wills to add, and sorting out a format for memorial inscriptions and photos. I hope lots of you will be able to contribute to this last one once it's up!

email problems

The website seems to be playing up a bit this week. If you are having trouble getting emails through to me it's probably my end, not yours, so just try again a bit later - sorry!

LUCAS 1670s to 1730s

Today I "met" Lorna who is researching her Lucas family of Ascott. Her Wing timeframe is a bit earlier than a lot of us - anyone out there got any useful tips or suggestions for other sources around this time beyond the standard parish registers and wills? The Lucas family were tenants of the Dormers at Wing Park and were friends with the Ffynes family.

POLLARD

Another POLLARD researcher has contacted me - this time a descendent of Flora Pollard, the youngest child of blacksmith Andrew and his wife Ann Susan. Are there any more descendents of the other Pollard siblings out there?

Banns

The eight decades of banns records have now been converted to the new format and uploaded to the website - phew!

Weather extremes

Here in NZ I am very very hot - we are sitting in the high 20s each day (celcius) and very high humidity, a typical not-so-comfortable Auckland February. I'm too tired from the heat to even think about sitting in front of a computer, let alone actually doing it for more than a few minutes at a time! So genealogy will have to wait a bit. Wish we could send some of this heat northwards to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere currently experiencing the big freeze.

Backing up

Hi everyone - I was just ferreting around looking for my draft of the JORDAN family tree in my computer, and was thinking how horrible it would be to lose everything........I do backups every week to DVD of my genealogical data, including all the Wing records, and I'm very happy I do that diligently as those new website pages could have been lost when the website's server crashed. Are you also doing backups, and keeping them in a different building to your main computer? Better safe than sorry.....

Back in business

The website's back now - the hosting company had to restore from their backups which were taken right before I did my Feb update so for a few hours today it reverted back to the January position - but now I've re-uploaded the new Feb pages so it's good to go.

If you emailed me over the last couple of days those emails have probably been lost too, so just resend it to me.

Temporarily broken

Apologies to anyone trying to access the website today. One of the hosting company's servers appears to have had a small meltdown, so while they are fixing it you will just have to take my word for it that the new pages are worth the wait!

Feb update

I've uploaded the February update (technically it's not February for another five hours but tough!). There's new pages on the straw plaiting industry within Wing and a couple of pages about the Dormer family. Hope you like them!

DORMER

I've completed my pages about the Dormer family ready for the February update. It's been an interesting process, wading through various source records, pedigree books, biographies, parish registers, reviewing my photos of the various memorials within All Saints Church, and checking out the various inaccurate or incomplete information already out there on the web! In particular there are many pedigrees online that are contradicted or greatly expanded by the information found in the Wing parish registers and memorials, so hopefully my final version of the Wing Dormer family tree has a greater chance of being accurate. As always, it's worrying some of the things you find floating around out there.....

Back to reality

First week back at work after the holidays always seems so long......

If anyone would like to retrace the steps of my summer holiday in the South Island, they can take a peek here.

On the Wing front, I've been working on a page about the Dormers. It's actually a long weekend here in Auckland (hurray for holidays!) so there's a chance it might even be finished in time for the February update.

Record keeping

I've just ventured into my family history cupboard where all my research on my own families live - not just the Wing ones! I thought it was pretty tidy, but there's an awfully large pile of unsorted unfiled bits and bobs, surname extracts from various parish records, certificates that haven't been entered into my computerised records, and a general mess. I can feel all those ancestors frowning down on me, so it's time to give them a bit of attention this weekend. Anyone else out there feeling the same?

McNaught watch

I wonder what John Thomas Windmill Claridge would have made of this!


Comet McNaught, Auckland NZ, 18th Jan 2007

Strawplaiting

I've finally finished my writeup about the strawplaiting industry in Wing. It covers a brief description of what the life of our strawplaiters might have been like, the rise and fall of strawplaiting as a source of employment in Wing, the proportion of Wing residents involved and some key individuals and families. If you have something to contribute then please let me know now. This page will be included in my February update.

I've also converted all the burial pages to the new look and uploaded those today. As part of that a few pages were renamed, so if you get a broken link you might need to refresh your browser.

WINDMILL CLARIDGE

An interesting snippet came my way today. A WINDMILL researcher alerted me to a 1936 obituary reproduced online for John Thomas Windmill CLARIDGE, the son of Thomas Claridge and Ann Windmill (technically John was born in Stewkley rather than Wing but we'll claim him as one of ours) - he ended up a vicar, but was also a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society! Thanks for the tip Linda.

I have just fixed a couple of broken links on the front page - apologies to everyone who tried to access the marriages or burials over the last few days, you should now be able to get to them just fine. I have also converted and uploaded the directory listings (but not the master consolidated name index for the directories yet).

New Year, New Look

The Wing One Place Study website now has a new look - I hope you like it. I've designed it so that it is easier to find the information and it's easier to read - you can also use the built-in features of your browser to increase or decrease font size as appropriate!

There's still some pages I need to convert to the new look (still wrestling with the big tables in them, ggrrr - so it's all the parish registers, census details and directory listings that are giving me grief) but these should hopefully be up next week.

Then it's the 1891 census, I promise!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! I'm back from my holiday and the spamming has subsided - so if you have emailed me over the last couple of weeks and I haven't replied, please email again. By this weekend I hope to have the January update finished and uploaded.