Any more gravestone photos out there?

If you have a photo of a gravestone at All Saints Church and haven't emailed it to me yet, please do so. The Memorial Inscriptions section of the website will be going live in a couple of days.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas break! I'm now on holiday for three weeks so will have plenty of time to tidy up various projects (although I am going to try to minimize time spent on the computer, we'll see how long that lasts!)

Not sure how many other people out there were similarly invited, but I've had access to the 1911 census for the last few days as part of their testing process before their website goes live in 2009. This census is interesting as there is a separate page for each household, filled out and signed by the head of the household, and the married women were also required to state how long they'd been married, and how many living and dead children they have from that marriage. When I logged on to see what I could find they only had a few counties available (not Buckinghamshire which has since been added - although there is no way I'd be able to afford to collate all the Wing entries), but they did have the London/Middlesex area so I was able to find three households of interest. One was my most immediate Wing connection, William Pollard then aged 9, and most excitingly his stepfather lists his occupation as manager for a horse dealer - so that's a baby step towards verifying that he did indeed work with the Rothschilds' horses. Another surprise was finding a visitor with them, a professional boxer from Dublin!

Yoohoo across the pond!

If there's anyone else out there descended from any of the Wing families who travelled to Australia on the Thetis in 1848, please do get in touch! Or, indeed, anyone descended from any convicts from Wing who were sent to Australia.....

A few of you have popped up lately, so it would be nice to hear from anyone else.

Memorial inscriptions

At the moment I'm gathering together the photos I took of the gravestones for my own family surnames when I visited Wing in 2005. These will be going online along with a transcription of the inscription itself (as these may be a little hard to read once the size and resolution of the photo has been adjusted for the web).

If you have photos (or even just notes of the inscription) of gravestones or memorials at All Saints Church, please do email them to me, and I can then set up a page for that surname. The larger the size and resolution, the easier it will be for me to manipulate behind the scenes to read particular words, so email them along as is without any processing and I'll do all the tweaking at my end.

The photographer or provider will of course be credited on each photo.

And if anyone living in the immediate area would like to pop by the churchyard and take a look at a couple of gravestones where my photos are unfortunately obscured by leaves and the like, please email me and I'll give you the details.

December update

If you're in the UK or somewhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, you'll be looking for something to fill your long winter evenings. I have prepared a bumper update for you this month so you can really get stuck into your genealogical research! Remember that each individual page on the website can be accessed directly via the sitemap - have you missed something interesting?

Big stuff:
* Burials for the period 1813 to 1845 have been added. The website now has a complete run of burial transcriptions from Oct 1783 to May 1909.
* I'm very excited to announce that the Buckinghamshire Record Society has given me permission to reproduce the 1798 Posse Comitatus for Wing. I've wanted to include this list of men on the website ever since I started the one-place-study, and now it's available.

Little stuff:
* There's a dozen or so new military men, including several serving in World War 1
* Some Methodist tweaks - I've illustrated the Methodist Roll page with an extract for the HEADY family, added Joseph WOOLHEAD to the Methodist page, and added a link to where the Wesleyan Metropolitan Register can now be found online (index + scans)
* Corrections to the Links and For Sale pages for some information that has changed
* I was getting tired of the monochromatic look, so we've gone green for the festive season.

Happy hunting!