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.

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.

Unsavoury allegations

Have been browsing some historical newspaper reports this morning, and am saddened to report that there appears to have been another immoral clergyman in Wing besides the forger Dr William DODD who was hanged in 1777. Curate William EYRE, who was in Wing some forty years after Dodd, apparently had a liking for young girls who he would adopt out of the workhouse and then turf out some years later once they'd become pregnant.

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!

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!

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!

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).