Online books

If you want to flesh out the lives of your ancestors, historical books are a good place to start. Both Google and Microsoft are making books available online, not a completely new concept but now easy to search and in some cases fully downloadable in PDF form to read at your leisure. The books each have scanned to date are quite different, so be sure to check out both sites if you are hunting for information, say on ag labs in Bucks.

Google Books (my find this morning - English Agriculture in 1850-51 by James Cain, published 1852)

Live Search Books (my find this morning - The Village Labourer 1760-1832 by JL Hammond and Barbara Hammond, published 1911)

If you find something interesting, leave a comment with the details!

June update

New for this month is marriage strays. Did your ancestor acquire a wife or husband from parts unknown? Perhaps their marriage took place in one of the other parishes covered in the Phillimores transcriptions (which generally ran up to around 1812), and if so you will hopefully find them on my new marriage strays page.

I have also updated the Non-conformist and Methodist pages as we have been able to identify the BRAND family as Primitive Methodist - thanks for the information Bert!

And lastly I have added a link to the TYRRELL Family History Society - as I type this their website appears to be down but it definitely exists so keep trying if you are having problems.

Back to the 1891 census

I've turned my attention back to the 1891 census transcription for Wing - it really is time to just get it finished, don't you think? I'm two-thirds of the way through it, that's almost 1200 people out of 1800.

A couple of pages I transcribed this week have some interesting non-conformist entries on it. The Primitive (Methodist) Chapel is listed, with no occupants but with the known Methodist families of GUESS and WOODWARDS living next door. And James and Kate HELEY, who were connected to the Congregational Union chapel, have an evangelist as a visitor in their home on census night. This is the same Kate HELEY who penned a notebook entitled "Scraps and Incidents and Notes of the Lord's Dealings" covering the decade before (this can be found at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies). I'd love to read that!

Ascott House

I was browsing our local paper online this morning, and there was a brief mention of Ascott House.....apparently one of the Rothschild family owns a property in NZ which is being developed as an organic farm!

David de Rothschild's Banks Peninsula farm

No Quakers in Wing

It's official. I've checked the Buckinghamshire digests of the Quaker registers for births, marriages and deaths to 1837, and there's no one from Wing listed.

Practical Family History magazine

The April issue of Practical Family History has just arrived here in NZ. It has an article on Finding Your Forebears in Buckinghamshire by Alan Stewart, which was kind enough to mention the Wing One Place Study - thanks Alan!

If you missed this issue, you can order a copy direct from the publishers at ABM Publishing.

Photo pages update

I haven't added any new photos, but the three pages that consist primarily of photos of modern-day Wing (Photos 2005, All Saints Church 2005, and the Wing War Memorial) have now been converted so they look the same as the rest of the website.