The key! The key!

New to the website yesterday was the key to the 1798 Wing enclosure map. This is a list of everyone who obtained land (or already held land) as part of the enclosure process. The text of the actual award, plus some sort of fancy mapping of the map itself, will come in due course. However the key is pretty useful on its own as simply a list of who was around in Wing at that time with enough clout to get land.

I've also added a more general page about farming in Wing. This explains the pre- and post-enclosure farming systems in general terms. I'll be expanding this later on with more information about what the farms, farmers and farm workers in Wing actually did.

Updates to the Burcott farm page

I've made a small update to the Burcott farm page today. With the help of some emails with the current resident of Burcott House, I've revisited all the old maps for Burcott and drawn some more solid conclusions as to the location of "the" Burcott House and similarly named properties in Burcott.

My behind-the-scenes project is still to finish transcribing the key to the 1797 enclosure map, after which I hope to be able to map the boundaries of the various plots of land against a current map. This should help illuminate those farms and their boundaries. Of course, nothing much will get done on this over the next couple of months as I'll be travelling! You can expect more photos of modern-day Wing, perhaps even some with me in them, upon my return. There may not be a building, gravestone or landmark untouched by my lens......

The moving target - farms

In 2011 I started work on the farms project. This is a series of pages with information about the farms and farmers of Wing, organised by property into regions/hamlets of Wing. I think this is going to be one of the more significant and globally useful projects within the one-place study.

So far I've completed the hamlets of Ascott and Burcott. Still to come are Crafton, Cottesloe, and "other". For these, I have roughly collated the basic information from census records and directories. The real work is in fleshing these out with additional information, attempting to work out the location of the farm, looking for any family connections between farms, and writing each farm up into a cohesive and interesting passage. I also have to complete a summary page about the agricultural industry in Wing as a whole and what working life would have been like for our farmer/ag lab ancestors.

I've learned that these farm pages actually take a lot longer than I would have expected. It will also get more problematic from here on in as fewer of the farms are actually named. However leaving this project half-finished will make me feel guilty every time I think about it, so I definitely want to get it done. Using my estimate of 4 hours a week being the time I can commmit to the one-place study, it'll probably take me a couple of months to finish each page. Allowing a month for the valuation books project, and another month for a stint of work on marriages from the parish registers, that means it'll likely be the end of August before it's done.

Long-term, I'll be able to expand these pages as more information comes to light. I also want to incorporate much better mapping of the farms - ideally identify the fields that encompassed each individual farm over time ("time" realistically being only 1798 onwards), and overlay these onto a modern map. Even if I've been able to achieve an accurate identification of a particular farm using various historical maps and records, I don't have the technical skill to realise my vision of the final map on the website. I suspect that's another huge learning curve - and huge learning curves take time!

[For background to The Moving Target series of posts, see the story so far]

GATES help

I'm back working on the pages about the farms and farmers of Wing, hoping to have at least one hamlet ready for the August update to the website. However I need a bit of help unravelling the GATES family (specifically the line that came to Wing from Aston Abbots, i.e. the line where Baron appears as a forename) in the early 20th century. If there are any descendants or relatives out there who could share information with me, please please email me at alex@wing-ops.org.uk as I'd love to get it resolved.

Focus on farming

After getting distracted on all manner of interesting and/or timeconsuming genealogical or real-life things, I'm going to try and stay focused on completing the overview of farming in Wing. Agriculture was fundamental to the Wing economy, so this section will be a biggie! I suspect it'll be one that's never quite complete either, there'll always be more snippets to add and certainly there will be documents at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies that I may or may not be able to get my hands on (all volunteers who might be able to help me out on that front gratefully appreciated).

My intention is to summarise the farming system, the farms of Wing and their resident families, and get that up on the website as soon as possible. It can then expand as people contribute relevant information.

In the meantime, if you have any information about your farmer family please email me. I've already accumulated some interesting snippets from your emails in the past, like the family gossip as to why the HEDGES farm at Cottesloe was split up and eventually lost. If you've researched the farm your ancestors worked, do let me know what you discovered. Photos of the farm, then or now, would also be great!

Distractions

Oooh, farms in Wing!

(I will now drag myself back to the previously scheduled census task)