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.

April update #2

It seems I'm the April fool - I've found some updates to the website that I prepared in January but never actually uploaded, so here they are! Two updates for the price of one!
 
Interested in the churches and chapels of Wing? There's some additional information from the 1851 Ecclesiastical Census that has been added to the non-conformist pages.

In particular, it's now clear that there were (at least) two dedicated Wesleyan Methodist chapel buildings - one was erected in 1813 and another in 1864. I'm hoping to find some newspaper reports to find out about this process - where exactly was the old chapel? Was it torn down, or converted?

It also now looks as if, although the Burcott Baptist Chapel was formed in 1840, it didn't have a dedicated building until 1845. The Crafton Independent Chapel also wasn't a separate building with regular services, it was an offshoot of Wingrave.

Good intentions

You will no doubt remember that I have spent the last week creating my project list for 2012. You may also remember that I wasn't supposed to do anything that wasn't on that list.

Downloading the 1851 eccesiastical census returns for the Leighton Buzzard registration district (free from The National Archives digital films section) and getting excited because the original returns have slightly more information than the summary I'd previously seen - not on that list.

So that's about 24 hours I lasted, then.

(I'm also downloading the letter books of the Leviathan for 1837 to 1839 - our pal William ADAMS was on that convict hulk from late 1838!)

February update

This month the changes and new pages are:

* Two new military men, Lyndon BOLTON and Eric WOODWARD, both serving in WW2
* Some 17th century Catholics and non-conformists of an unspecified denomination have been added. On a related note, does anyone know why being a midwife in that era would get you excommunicated? A quick Google suggests that perhaps midwives had to be licenced by the church, does anyone know exactly what the story was?
* A new gazetteer entry, this time from 1914
* A new directory, the Kelly's 1931 edition, thanks to Alison
* A makeover for the index of names from directories

Happy researching!

October update

Last month was the 1891 census, but this month we jump back in time several hundred years. There's some new pages in the Pre-1546 section, including entries from the Records of the Chancery, Records of the Exchequer, and a Very Brief Historical Background blurb has been added.

Another new addition is the final key page of the Non-conformist section, the Catholics of Wing.

February update

To make up for the fact there wasn't a January update, it's a bumper one this time - I've cleaned up a lot of outstanding filing and added all those snippets to the website:

First up is a good overhaul of the "Commercial Records" page necessitated by the various takeovers and closures in the genealogical publishing industry.

There's been some 17th century action, with new additions to the non-conformist page plus new will extracts for Richard Honor from 1664 and Elizabeth Lathwell from 1663.

Three marriage strays from the Waddesdon parish registers in the early 1800s have been added.

Some new finds on Google Books and the London Gazette have been added to the Miscellany page, the Adams murder page, the strawplaiting and brickmaking pages.

Jumping forward to the 20th century, the 1935 Kellys directory has been added.

And lastly, there's a new graphic greeting you on the front page. This is a vintage postcard from the early 1900s which I thought was eminently suitable for the home page.

Remember you can press Ctrl-F5 in your browser to refresh the home page if it's still showing as December - enjoy!

November update

This month there's a number of small additions scattered over the website:

Military Men:
* a link to Project Gutenberg's copy of The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
* new listings for John BANDY alias MAYNE, Frederick Arthur HOWCUTT, Edwin JORDAN, Edwin RANDALL, Thomas ROWE, George SAUNDERS and Frederick WOOLHEAD
* updates to Albert BANDY, Albert BRAND, James BURROWS, Arthur CUTLER, William George PEASE and William WOOLHEAD

Some other pages have been updated thanks to the useful information found in the War Office 364 series, notably:

Baptist: Frederick WOOLHEAD (also a link to the obituary of Hannah HELEY in the Baptist Magazine)
Wesleyan Methodist: William WOOLHEAD
Catholic: Thomas ROWE (not that the Catholic page is up on the website yet as it's a bit short of information - does anyone have anything they can contribute?)

The DORMER page has been updated to include the charming epitaph for Magdalen Dormer from St Mary the Virgin in Waterperry Oxfordshire.

I haven't yet found a suitable place to record William WOOLHEAD's interesting tattoos though - there may not be enough of our Wing ancestors with body art to warrant its own page! I'd be intrigued to be proved wrong though.....

October update

Another month, another update, and it's another big one! The first batch of 800 baptisms have been transcribed, these cover the years 1813 to 1836 inclusive - as with last month's burials, you may want to check the sitemap for links to individual years. And as I've previously mentioned, around 25% of these are NOT in the IGI extracted batch for this period so I'm hoping that some of you will be able to solve some mysteries (or maybe inadvertently shake your existing tree).

I've also made some minor changes to the Methodist page (thanks to Ewart Tearle who has allowed me to use his photo of the old Primitive Methodist Chapel building), and the links page - some of the linked pages had moved on but I've managed to track them all down again now.

Now I'm off to doublecheck that all those baptisms are correctly reflected in my own tree!

July update

The Wing One Place Study has been updated for July. Quite a lot of individual pages have new snippets of information added, and there's a couple of new pages.

* Researching before 1546, when the parish registers began
* Feet of Fines for Wing
* a new will extract (Henry STRATFOLD who owned land in Wing)
* a new link (to a CULVERHOUSE one name study)
* a new marriage stray (REEVES in Buckingham)
* a new bankruptcy for the Miscellany (George HEADY, one of Wing's straw dealers)

I've also made some small updates to the Non-Conformist pages (added a photo of the Union Chapel, a note about a collection amongst the Burcott Baptists, a link to an interesting Primitive Methodist book on Google books, and a few other Primitive Methodist snippets).

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!

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.

May update

The new pages for May are all about non-conformists in Wing - the chapels that existed, the records that are available, along with transcriptions of some of the source records and other snippets that may include one of your surnames! Non-conformity almost seems to be the norm in Wing judging by the numbers attending those chapels, so more than likely there will be a branch of your tree in there somewhere.

If you have anything else to contribute to the non-conformist pages, perhaps some evidence that your ancestor was also non-conformist, please let me know.

Another BECKETT tragedy

You may remember the sad case of Maria BECKETT who killed her granddaughter in Dec 1856 while of unsound mind (story here). I've just found another sad story for the Beckett family, four years after this event. One of Maria's sons, Jesse, was "killed by a horse" in January 1861 according to the records of the Lake Street Baptist Church in Leighton Buzzard who counted the Becketts among their members. Jesse was 25.

Non-conformist marriages post-1837

Does anyone have any marriage certificates of their Wing ancestors that indicate the wedding took place in a non-conformist chapel? I'd be interested to know if any of the local chapels were licenced.

In search of Baptists

It seems very quiet out there, I haven't even had much spam email lately! What's everyone else researching at the moment? I'm waiting on a film of Baptist records to arrive at my local LDS Family History Centre so I can continue looking at non-conformists in Wing.

No March update

I've had such a busy February I haven't had a chance to finalise anything new for the website. I did get all the banns converted to the new format, ditto the 1841 and 1871 census which went up on the site yesterday. There's still a few more pages to convert to the new look (most notably the marriages), so those should appear over the next few weeks.

New bits waiting in the wings that didn't quite get finished in Feb are that pesky 1891 census, new pages about non-conformity in Wing including the people listed on the Methodist Roll of 1898, a few more wills to add, and sorting out a format for memorial inscriptions and photos. I hope lots of you will be able to contribute to this last one once it's up!

Perspective

Remember, remember the 5th of November.........I wonder how long it took for the news to travel by word of mouth to rural Bucks? And would it have had any more direct relevance for our ag lab ancestors than it does for us today?

I dare say it was much closer to home for the openly Catholic Dormer family who owned Ascott. The plot was overseen by Robert Catesby - was this a relation of Dorothy Catesby who married Sir William Dormer of Wing and founded the almhouses of Wing in 1562? Dorothy died in 1613 and her son Robert Lord Dormer held Ascott in 1605.