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.