Marriages in the 1850s

The marriages at All Saints Church for the period 1850 to 1859 have now been transcribed and added to the website.

Marriages in the 1840s

The marriages at All Saints Church for the period 1840 to 1849 have now been transcribed and added to the website. I've also noted down in the comments column if I spotted witnesses later getting married to each other!

In sickness and in health

I have a new section up on the website that focuses on health - or, as is generally the case, the lack thereof. Head over to learn about Charlotte Cottage, smallpox, typhoid, accidents, mental health issues and the like.

As I mention on the introductory page it's a bit challenging to gather global information, however anecdotes from your own Wing families are very welcome. If you have someone in your tree with a particular health issue, who had an newsworthy accident, or who died from something out of the ordinary, please email me and let me know.

FYNES, GASKINs and some sights to see

Boy, it's been a long time since I told you what I was up to. I have been adding little bits to the website here and there, like some gravestones for the FYNES and GASKIN families. The biggest addition lately has been a timeline showing images of All Saints Church through the ages - well, through the comparatively recent postcard age of 1902 onwards! Check it out and let me know what you think. I'll have some further postcards to add to it in a few week's time.

I do have a tendency to get stuck thinking about projects rather than just getting stuck in to them, so I also reorganised my one-place study to-do lists - including consolidating them into a single list. This might sound a little like the opposite of getting stuck in, but I'm hoping the list will take the decision-making out of the equation. All I have to do is just slowly work my way through the extremely long list, completing each project and bringing all that lovely new information to you on the website. Wish me luck!

The Wesleyan Methodist chapel

I came across a new resource, the 1873 Returns of accommodation provided in Wesleyan Methodist Chapels, available at My Wesleyan Methodist Ancestors, that might be of interest to other UK one-place studiers. It was a nationwide survey and will tell you whether there was a chapel in your place and the number of seatings. Wing held 411, and I've added that snippet to my Methodists page.

The voyage of the Thetis 1848

It's finally happened - I have finally published a page about the voyage of the Thetis from London to Sydney in 1848, its precious cargo of 24 Wing emigrants and what became of them in Australia. Who gave birth on board? Who returned to Wing? Who was shot to death? Find out here.

As a side note, our Wing folk weren't the only precious things on board. The 17 Jun 1848 issue of the New Zealander includes the calamitous news that the Thetis was carrying English newspapers up to 8 February on board, but with "a most unpardonable disregard to the interests of the colonies to which they were consigned made away with the papers thus confided, handing them over to the passengers of homeward bound ships which they spoke somewhere about the equator. This is abominable, as Parliament was to reassemble on the 3rd, and but for this nefarious deprivation we might probably have learnt the issue of the second reading of the bill for our new constitution." Strong words indeed!

A little bit broken

If you are visiting the website you might get some 404s, or notice that page and image links are a bit squiffy. I've just moved server and there are still a few glitches to iron out. Hopefully I'll have everything tidied up soon.

Out!

I've been reading through old issues of the Leighton Buzzard Observer and have transcribed some 1863 cricket reports for a new Cricketers page on the website. Sounds like Wing wasn't bad! Did any of your ancestors play? Some of these reports are particularly interesting as they are farm vs farm, meaning you may learn your ancestor's employer.

Update-a-palooza

Here's a whole assortment of small updates that I had forgotten to tell you about, and other things rescued from their perpetual draft state and published (better to share them as is than wait until they are a perfect and complete record!). In historical order:


For those of you interested in early Wing, there's a new page with some extracts from the 16th-century churchwardens accounts that name residents. There's also some new pages about the history of All Saints Church (previously published elsewhere online). I've illustrated these with several photos taken on my trip to Wing in September 2013.

The marriages for 1838 and 1839 have been added.
 
An extract from the 1848 Topographical Dictionary of England has been added to the Gazetteers page, along with Wing's entry from the 1813 Magna Britannia.

I found the service record for Charles CARTER in the WO363 series and he's been added to the 19th century servicemen list and the Wesleyan Methodist pages. He also had a monobrow but I don't exactly have a page for that.....

New photos have been added to existing pages, such as the millstones that pave the lych-gate which can now been seen on the Milling page.

Sidney CUTLER has been added to the 20th century servicemen page as he joined the Territorials in 1928 (he served in WW1 too but I haven't updated that page for my most recent finds yet).

There's a new section in Explorations - leisure! This currently features some footballers who you may have seen earlier on this blog.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone, and good luck on your ancestor hunt this year.

I've added a new VALLENTINE memorial inscription to the website. There'll be more to come on the Vallentines shortly.

Update: very shortly in fact, I've also added the last remaining Vallentine gravestone to the website.

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.

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!