WW1 event in Wing

If you have an interest in Wing during WWI and are able to get to this event - do go! I won't make it, what with me being in NZ, but I'm sure it'll be an interesting afternoon.

Man down

Today is 14 September 2014, the centenary of the death of the first Wing man to fall in WW1. Thanks for your service, Jim.

WW1 servicemen profiles

Famous last words on that list of WW1 servicemen I uploaded - I knew there would be some extras to be added once I'd managed to identify more details about them, but I wasn't expecting to trip over numerous others! Five RAF, two Royal Navy and three Army boys so far.

I've also finished profiles of the first couple of WW1 servicemen, both men that died in 1914, and one has been added to the website. This did produce a conundrum for me - as a one-place studier I'm interested in everyone who ever lived in Wing, even if it was just for a short while. You can depend on your research to throw up unusual situations though and that's what I have with this first man. His entry for National Roll of the Great War has his address as Littleworth in Wing, which is why he was on my radar, however I've done a fair bit of digging and I'm pretty sure he never actually lived in Wing!

I do know exactly why he was recorded that way, and what his connection to Wing was, and on balance it seems wrong to exclude him from my list since someone may come across that National Roll entry and want to know why he's not on my list (or I might have a senior moment in future and think I've made a glaring omission!) Also, I have already done all that research which might be of interest to someone out there. My solution was to add him to my servicemen list, with a comment he is "of Stewkley", and include his profile complete with an explanation of his Wing connection. If you are interested in Leonard KEEN of Stewkley who first set foot in France 100 years ago tomorrow, head on over to the first of my Servicemen Profiles page to learn more.

Incidentally, I've decided to set up the servicemen profiles pages with a page for each surname. This follows the same logic as the memorial inscriptions pages, namely that if you are interested in one particular person of that surname you are likely interested in others so I may as well have them together on one page.


I've also tripped over a few non-WW1 servicemen (mostly 19th century) in the process, namely BATES and BOYD, and they have been added to the website.

By the way, that process was via placename searches across Find My Past's WW1 record collection. It looks like some of these likely came as a result of their project to re-scan the WO363/WO364 series, but others will simply be differences in indexing as compared to Ancestry.com.

1831 militia men

There's a very small update to the website today, the addition of three Wing men from the October 1831 muster rolls for the Royal Bucks Militia.

Lights out

Today is the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 and  I have turned the lights out on the Wing One-Place Study website to acknowledge those from Wing that served.

If you continue on to the website, you'll find that the WW1 page has been expanded. You may recall at the beginning of the year I was planning to have profiles of each serviceman up on the website beginning this month. The rapid escalation in the number of men (and women) with Wing connections who served during the war has meant I've now declared this a four-year centenary project. Today I have updated the list of servicepeople, expanding it from 125 to 315 people, so that you can see who I've identified so far - the first step in the project. This won't be my "final" word on the names of WW1 servicemen born in, living in, or with other close connections to Wing, but it's getting there - there's around 50 more men I don't have full names or regiments for yet.

If you have a serviceman ancestor from Wing, have info to share, or are simply keen to see their profile make it online sooner rather than later, please email me so I can prioritise them (and perhaps we can work together on researching them). While you're waiting, can I suggest a trip to the wonderful new Wing At War website from my friend Sarah? She has transcribed the parish magazines for Wing for the WW1 period and collated information on a variety of topics for you to read about.

COTES memorial

There are several memorials to Charles COTES around the village. One is the memorial plaque inside All Saints Church and I've added a photo of this along with a newspaper report of the dedication of the plaque in 1905 and a photo of St Katherine's Chapel, referred to in the article and in which the memorial sits.

My new best friend Sarah has been doing some research into the village hall, another, slightly larger, memorial to Charles, and I'll point you to her findings soon.

An entirely random assortment of updates

A week or so ago I added a few snippets of information to the Wing One-Place Study website and forgot to tell you about them.

• marriages for MALLET and LANGLEY on the Methodist page
• a LANGHAM-BURROWS marriage on the marriage strays page (in a registry office!)

They aren't entirely random of course, they have all come from the Bucks Herald.

A new vicar

I understand that Wing has a new vicar - welcome to Rev Helen Barnes! She is the first female vicar of Wing and I'm very excited to be able to add her to my list of clergy of All Saints.

TATHAM memorials

Following on from yesterday's update of various memorial inscriptions for vicar Peter Thomas Ouvry, today it's the turn of vicar Francis Henry Tatham. As well as his family gravestone, now rather neglected and overgrown, there's a handsome memorial inside All Saints and the lovely lychgate to the church.

Going to the chapel

But you won't be getting married, as these chapels are no longer open. I've added a photo of the former Primitive Methodist chapel in Crafton to the Methodist webpage, and a photo of the former Union chapel in Littleworth to the Independents webpage.

OUVRY stained glass

There are a couple of vicars who each spent several decades in Wing, thereby ensuring I'm intimately acquainted with their handwriting!

The first of these was Peter Thomas Ouvry who passed away in 1891. Today I have uploaded a new memorial inscription page for the Ouvry family - this contains not only their family gravestone, situated on the edge of the graveyard bordering the Vicarage, but also the stunning stained glass memorial to Rev. Ouvry inside All Saints. On the webpage I've included a newspaper report of the unveiling of the stained glass in 1895.

In future I'll generally be ensuring that you can click through on any photo on the website to see a larger version, and this is the first memorial inscription page I've done this for.

Common Pleas

Just a quick note to say there is a new page up on the website - this lists cases for Wing residents found in the Rolls of the Court of Common Pleas in the 1418 to 1519 period. The cases were very kindly provided to me by Vance, who is a descendant of the early MEADs of Wing and is part of the volunteer team indexing these rolls for the Anglo-American Legal Tradition.

I wasn't previously aware of this website but it's a very exciting one if you are interested in early legal cases in Britain - they have the permission of the National Archives to digitize and put these records online, all for free, so if you have traced your family quite far back and are aware of a court case involving them it's worth taking the time to figure out how the AALT website works and see if the image is there so you can read all the details (possibly assuming you can read Latin, or course). I'll be spending a bit more time looking around myself, there's so much material there!

Wing football team 1928

Occasionally you receive exciting mail and today was one of those days. Thanks to the lovely Barbara in the US, I now have a newspaper clipping about the Wing football team of 1927/8! This photo was published in the Leighton Buzzard Observer in February 1988:

Wing football team 1927/28

A letter from Joe Brand of Wantage Close was subsequently published - the sole surviving member of the group at that time, he named the men as follows:

Back row standing: P Paxton (trainer), W Corbett, W Woolhead, L Pitchford, E Gates, Joe Brand, G Woodwards, Mr Osborne (chairman), landlord of the Dove Inn [which you can see in the background] P Janes, and L Corbett (secretary).

Middle row seated: J Corbett (linesman), B Roper, W Rowe, V Woodwards, and Mr Fowler of Aylesbury (referee).

Front row seated: M Bolton, L Bandy, W Hounslow, O Horne, and F Rickard.

The team had won the Marsworth Cup a week or two previously. Well done, lads!

WW1 servicemen - an update

No, not an update to the website yet, but here's why....

My list of Wing's WW1 servicemen on the website had around 125 men. My offline list of Wing's WW1 servicemen currently has around 360. As I've said before, I may be some time researching.

I have around 20 pairs of men where their names are similar. Some of these will be because they are, in fact, the same man, so my next step is to look specifically at these pairs to see if I can conclusively prove they are the same man and therefore combine their records, or alternatively conclusively prove they are not the same man so I can plough on researching them both. Guess which outcome I'm hoping for?

Clergy information

I've annotated the new Clergy of All Saints Church page with links to some of their entries in The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 website - will try and hunt the rest down later.
 
I'm also using up some credits I have at the British Newspaper Archive ("using up" makes it sounds like work, when it is in fact glorious and fun), and came across a brief newspaper report of a case brought against labourer John BULL for setting snares on the farm on John PRENTICE. William MORGAN is named as gamekeeper so I have added William to the writeup of Waterloo Farm on the Ascott Farms page.

1332 Lay Subsidies

New page on the website this afternoon- the 1332 lay subsidies have been added (why yes, I did get inspired by the tax Hangout) - a little something for those of you with very early connections with Wing.

Domesday Book

I've just attended the Society for One-Place Studies HangoutOnAir on taxes. Often the benefit of tax records is not the tax itself, but the additional information, the roll-call of residents who met the criteria for the tax, the relative wealth of those individuals based on their relative tax bill, the changing property sizes, and so on. It's a great talk, so do go and watch it.

As a result I was inspired to move the entry for the 1086 Domesday Book for Wing and Crafton from the Gazetteers page to its own page within my new Rolls, Polls and Taxes section, and added an image of the entry from the book itself. Kim of the Bratton Clovelly OPS highlighted a book with methodology for roughly calculating population from the headcount mentioned in the Domesday Book so I'm keen to get my hands on that book and see what number I come up with!

Makeover

The Wing Buckinghamshire One-Place Study website has had a makeover! In the process the website gained two new pages, a list of past clergy at All Saints and a list of old place names within Wing - both of these are based on information that was previously included on the former modern-day Wing website and have been expanded a little bit by me.

Now THAT unexpectedly-time-consuming project is done I'll be able to bring you some more content (and illustrations - remember those hundreds of photos I took on my trip to Wing last year?)

Take my money

Commercial genealogy providers, here's how to take my money:

1. I Always Search Individual Record Sets

I'm not a beginner, I've been at this a while. Your global search function across all your databases is only good for doing speculative searches. I almost always search by going through your lists of record sets or databases, identifying one that sounds promising then reading your blurb to find out exactly what it is, where it came from, and any search hints i.e. what their little quirks are, which fields are actually contained in it, which are indexed, whether there are any gaps in your record set. Then I search just that record set, using what I've learned to search smarter and get more results of interest.

If you don't tell me which record sets you have, in enough detail, then I won't give you money.

If you don't tell me whether I get access to a particular record set I'm interested in within the subcription/access option I'm contemplating before I give you money, then I won't give you money.

If I can't search by individual record set, then I won't give you money.

2. I Like To Search By Place.

I'm a one-place studier. I'm particularly interested in what kinds of place fields are in a record set, what level (country? county? village?) they've likely been specified to, and whether you've indexed them. I'm also interested in context, neighbours and the like, so I like to browse pages before and after any given result, just in case something illuminating pops up. Sometimes I even - egads! - browse from the beginning of the record set, in case there's general information there!

Without the background information about place fields your record set has limited use to me, and I won't give you money.

Without the ability to search by place field (alone, without forcing me to search with a surname) you tend to induce a murderous rage, and I won't give you money.


It should be pretty simple for me to give you money. Stop trying to make it harder.

Dee Saxby, are you out there?

On the offchance Dee Saxby is out there reading this, please email me - I wanted to chat re some of the WW1 servicemen in your CARTER and POLLARD families but the email address I have for you doesn't work any more.

In other news, I now have more than 300 WW1 servicemen from Wing to research. I may be some time.

It's raining men

Servicemen's names, that is......

I have received a big boost to my World War One centenary project. Sarah Roe of the Wing Heritage Group has very kindly sent me the names of servicemen mentioned in the parish magazine written by vicar Francis Henry Tatham during WWI. This has doubled my list of men - now I have 264 known men with Wing connections that served. That's a lot of men for me to research!

Remember, if your ancestor or relative from Wing Buckinghamshire served in WWI please email me (even if you have emailed me before) so that we can share information.

Sportsmans Arms

Sportsmans Arms, Littleworth, on an overcast September day in 2013.

Pubs come and go and for a one-place studier this is always a little bit sad. No more Six Bells in the hamlet of Burcott, no more Dove in Wing itself, and soon, perhaps, no more Sportmans Arms in the hamlet of Littleworth. The pub has been up for sale for a while and now has planning permission for a house conversion should that prove a more attractive option for a potential buyer.

A quick roundup of Sportsmans Arms publicans from local directories and census records:

1887 Robert Davidson
1891 James Cane
1895 Pinfold
1899 Miss Mary Boyland
1901 - 1903 James Wyatt
1907 Edward Sinkler
1911 Edward Sinkler Huntsman (looks like a correction of the 1907 entry - Mr Huntsman committed suicide in 1911)
1924 Frank Wootton 
1928 Frederick Wootton
1931 Mrs Eliza Wootton
1935 Ernest J Pattendon

In 1871 22-year-old widow Elizabeth Sayell, licenced victualler, is living in Littleworth but the property isn't explicitly named as the Sportmans Arms. According to beer house records for 1872 held at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies it definitely was the Sportsmans Arms though, and the licence for it was first granted in 1868.

In 1881 George Bandy and family were living at the Sportsmans Arms but he's recorded as an ag lab - there's evidently no resident publican.

19th century military men

One of my fellow POLLARD descendants (hi Clive!) alerted me to the WO25 military records series in which some of our Pollards are lurking. Along with George and Andrew I found a few other men from Wing recorded in there, and they have now been added to the 19th century military page. If you have ABBOTT, BATES, CLARK, HUBBARD, JAPP, JENNINGS, JORDAN or POLLARD in your tree from Wing in the early 19th century that should please you. There's always more to find out there!

I've also found a couple more WW1 servicemen as I continue on my WW1 project, but I won't be updating the website for them until a bit later on.

WW1 servicemen list updated

I've made a couple of minor tweaks to the military pages today as a result of my research to date into the WWI servicemen. Note that I won't be updating for everything, there will be extended profile pages coming at a future date so I will save most of the changes for then, however I am removing any men that are incorrectly listed on any given military page. Today I've removed an EGGLETON who was born in Askett rather than Ascott, and also removed a DEANE who I suspect wasn't in the RAF until after WWI.

World War One Centenary Project

During 2014 I'm participating in the Society for One-Place Studies annual project to focus on World War One and its impact on our one-place study communities.

I already have a partial list of WWI servicemen from Wing, however I intend to go back and systematically work through researching each man and their service history to create a military profile of them for the website. With 48 casualties recorded on Wing's war memorial and several more known to have died but not been recorded on the memorial, let alone all those who served and returned home, I have my work cut out for me!

If your ancestor or relative from Wing served in World War One please email me (even if you have emailed me before) so that we can share information.