September update

It's a small update this month - the abstract of the will of Elizabeth FOUNTAINE who died in 1851 has been added. If anyone has wills for any of their farming ancestors in Wing that aren't already abstracted on the website, please email me as they will be useful both in their own right and to help me out with the farms pages.

The will of Thomas ADAMS

Just after Christmas in 1837, Burcott farmer Thomas ADAMS was murdered. His eldest son William was charged with the murder but found not guilty - you can read newspaper reports of the trial along with other contemporary commentary as to the events that transpired and likelihood of the verdict being correct.

Here's the Adams family in question (click to enlarge):



Thomas had drafted his will in 1835, then added a codicil in early 1837. His wife Martha had died in 1828 however he had twelve surviving children, some adult, some minor, to be considered as well as responsibilities for legacies to his mother and brother. The will itself runs over seven PDF pages, has a lot of what-if scenarios in it, and is altered slightly by the codicil, so the abstract that now appears on the Wing One Place Study wills pages is quite abbreviated.

The first point I found interesting is the explicit instructions he left as to his grave - in a common grave in the church yard of Wing as near as possible to the remains of his late father and grandfather, and that "plain head and foot stones" should be raised for himself and his father. You can see Thomas' stone illustrating my page of the newspaper reports, and it stands tucked up against All Saints Church in the north-west corner. It is pretty plain I guess, however from his wording I would almost expect it to be completely unengraved. I didn't specifically take note of any other Adams gravestones in the immediate vicinity but I understand that there are indeed others in adjoining plots. Has anyone else seen explicit instructions like this in the will of their ancestors from Wing?

Thomas had an obligation under his father's will to make annual payments to his mother and brother, and this continues under Thomas' will (the obligation is passed on to son Henry Charles once Henry turns 21 if his grandmother and uncle are still living). After their decease, an annual sum is to be paid to son William - would William still have been entitled to receive this given the court cases? Perhaps it never became an issue - he died 8 years later so may have predeceased his grandmother and uncle. I guess I should look those deaths up....

William's entitlement to this sum was void if he ended up inheriting "estates lately belonging to Stephen Raymond esquire deceased situate in the said county of Bedford" - what connection did Stephen Raymond have to the Adams family? Why was there a question mark over William's possible inheritance from him - was this dependent on some other event that hadn't yet occurred, especially as it is obviously still in doubt at the time Thomas added the codicil to his will? I must look for Stephen Raymond's will!

The upshot of the rest of the will is that younger son Henry Charles Adams, who was 11 at the time the will was drafted, was the primary heir rather then eldest son William Francis. Was this a reflection of the relationship between Thomas and then-fifteen-year-old William, or was the inheritance from Stephen Raymond sufficient to provide for William?

Freehold property in Wing (including four lots named with reference to the Wing inclosure map of 1797 which I don't have) and Stewkley was to be held in trust for Henry Charles, while copyhold property in Wing was to be sold and the proceeds plus any rents received along the way held in trust and used to pay various legacies to Thomas' other children. The two eldest daughters were married by then and aren't mentioned at all (had they died by then?) while the remaining seven daughters (including one married) and William received a total of £70 plus their share of sums paid by the trustees for "heriots, fines and fees in procuring admission to the copyhold part of the said hereditaments". I hadn't encountered the term heriots before but apparently this is a term dating back to feudal times - probably a bit rare by 1835 from the sound of it? - and means a death-duty payable by the lessee (in this case by Thomas) to the lords owning the property. I think the "fines and fees" also sound like they may be payments out, which would mean those charges would all be deducted from the sums payable to the children. Should those named children die, any surviving lawful issue they left behind would take their parent's share.

All the farm assets (eg cattle, grain, implements) and household goods were to be sold after Thomas died, and together with any actual money would fund the funeral, testamentary and gravestone costs. After those costs were covered, £400 was set aside to build "a substantial farm house" for the benefit of Henry Charles. The balance of this pool of funds was then to be divided against the other named children. The reference to building a farm house is interesting - was the current home in disrepair? Not grand enough? The codicil, added in 1837, mentions the £400 but the wording seems a bit odd and I can't work out if it implies the house had since been built or if Thomas decided that this created an imbalance and that William should get the equivalent amount.

This was a particularly long and interesting will, especially in light of subsequent events in this family. It's also been helpful in providing interesting snippets about Burcott House Farm, the property owned by Henry Charles Adams and previously farmed by his father and grandfather by the sound of it. As you can see there's a few more things coming out of this will for me to research!

Attorneys in Leighton Buzzard

Most of the Wing wills I've been looking at the last two weeks (in the 1804 to 1808 period) have various WILLIS men as witnesses. It transpires that these men are attorneys practising in Leighton Buzzard, including one Valentine WILLIS who initially baffled me by signing his name as Val with a superscript e. The Willis family appear to continue on in this line of work in Leighton Buzzard throughout the century.

Interestly, Elizabeth KEEN refers to David Willis as her "esteemed friend" when appointing him as executor.

Not so focused on farming

In my defence, as well as not making any progress so far this month on the farming pages I haven't made progress on anything else genealogical......

However, the last of the films I ordered back in August last year at the local LDS Family History Centre arrived this week. This particular film has the original wills in the probate records for the Archdeaconry of Buckinghamshire for the 1803 to 1808 period. A quick initial visit to see how the contents were structured and locate a couple of the wills I was after pretty much comprises all my genealogical research for the month!

And perhaps I can claim that it was connected to the Wing farms project, as one of those wills was for Robert ADAMS in 1804 - he farmed at Burcott House Farm.

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!

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).

April update

Brand new this month is:

Wing's Neighbours - some suggestions of where to start looking for your ancestors before and after their time in Wing. I realised I needed to make a list like this to add some structure for hunting down my own families, and hopefully it will be useful for everyone else out there as well. I've added links to websites that include any reasonable amounts of genealogical data for those particular villages.

Also some updates to the following pages:

Links - new pages for FOSKETT and TEARLE surnames, and a few links for Wing's neighbours that weren't relevant for the new page above but are a very interesting read nonetheless.

Military men - added BEILBY, BURROWS and expanded info for BOCK found in the War Office 364 series (the Unburnt Records, which are excellent if your ancestor happens to be one of the less than 10% included in this series!), plus a new link about the Wing airfield during WWII.

Miscellany - four new snippets here

and last but not least, Will Extracts - new entries for BISHOP, BRANDON, FFYNES, LUCAS, MORTIMER and PAINE. If you have some more tucked away amongst your research, please forward the info to me, either the will itself or your transcript or extract from it.

FOSKETT

Sandra has put her one-name study of FOSKETT online - if you have Fosketts it's well worth a visit.
www.foskett-genealogy.co.uk

In other matters, last call for any wills you may want to share....over the next couple of days I'll be finishing off the pages for the April update to the website.

Wills

I'm updating the wills pages with half a dozen new wills that fellow genealogists out there have provided. Do you have a will for one of your Wing family that you could share? I'm happy to receive either copies of the will, or transcriptions of it!

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!