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!