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!

LMA at Ancestry - name indexes

I noted in a previous blog entry that one of the three new databases of records from the London Metropolitan Archives now up at Ancestry has not been indexed by name. Word from Ancestry, via a response to my question on their blog, is that they are focusing their time on indexing the parish records in the LMA series, and may go back to index some of the less critical LMA databases later on.

I do hope they eventually go back and index them all, but I certainly agree that the parish registers are a higher priority.

I also wish that while we're waiting for Ancestry to maybe get around to indexing that database, someone out there in internet-land would put together a detailed list of the individual documents/registers within that one "records" database. That would be a much more helpful finding aid than taking forever to drill down to see what documents are in there, then not knowing exactly how the images are structured, then giving up before you get to the real information (like I almost did with the example below). Entries like...

"Register of Apprentices Bound or Assigned by the Board of Guardians of the Parish of St Johns Hampstead 1851 to 1890 - LMA ref HPBG/110 - images 2 to 11 lists apprentices alphabetically with a folio number, this folio number corresponds to images 12 to 20 which contains the detailed entry including their age, parents, date and details of apprenticeship entered into"

...with a link to the Ancestry page which links to the images for that set of documents. Wouldn't that be 100 times better? Anyone want to put that together? I'm already occupied with my Wing vision......

April update

This month the 1869 Post Office directory was added - this helps fill the gap between the 1864 directory and the 1871 census. This directory also sees the first time a member of the ROTHSCHILD family appears listed as a resident in Wing.

Two more military men were added, Jeffrey TEARLE in WW1 and Ernest Henry GIBBS in WW2. I still only have a handful of Wing WWII men - if your father or grandfather served and should be there, email me to let me know his details.

I've also done the periodic checking of external links from the website, so various pages have been updated with corrections to those.

Place List report - Rootsmagic

In order to investigate the LMA release properly, I need a handy list of exactly who/what/when in my family tree was ever in the greater London area. Rootsmagic has a quite nice Place List report that does this - it reverses the elements of the place name in entries so they sort by county first, then parish, and shows you each individual event that occurred in that place. You have a choice of ALL places or a single selected place (which means the smallest level of detail like individual house address), and unfortunately you can't filter by part of the place - like, say *london* or *middlesex* which would be handy in this instance to get a nice concise report! I've exported the report to a text file so I can cut out the bit I want for handy printing.

The PAF equivalent to this report doesn't have any options for you to play with - it sorts the places in a similar way, but sorts the events in each place by surname rather than date (Rootsmagic sorts by date). Neither program gives you an option to select if you'd like them sorted by date or name. My dream genealogy program would.....

For that matter, it would also be handy if reports in genealogy programs showed both the maiden and married surnames of the females where the date of the event falls after the marriage.

As an aside, my entries from Wing cover 19 pages.

LMA at Ancestry - updates from my evening's journey

As with most databases, the indexing has the usual flaws. If anyone is looking for the burial of a James CRUTCH in 1855, he's currently going by "Ignes". I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to see James Crutch on one line, John Smith (ha!) on the next, and not confuse the various loops and flourishes - the top of the J in John can't simultaneously be the bottom of a g in the above line, particularly if you end up with something like "Ignes" as a result!

[as a complete aside, googling Ignes led me here - if anyone would like to show their gratitude for the Wing One Place Study by sending me an Midi Sophia I would not object]

The majority of my London ancestors have surnames like, say, HUGHES or WHITE or HALL. And London is not a small place, as you know.......the only upside is that these surnames are more likely to have been transcribed correctly! The births and deaths in this release are those recorded in the workhouses for each union included (and the years covered varies - use the browse feature in each collection to work out exactly what's in there) and searching for very common surnames like these won't (yet) produce an overwhelming number of results.

Note that the births and deaths databases don't include all the poor law unions that I flagged in my earlier post - I had picked these up from the generic "poor law unions" database but it didn't follow that every union mentioned there was included in the other two databases - for example Padddington doesn't appear in these two databases but it is in the generic "poor law union" database. And on that topic....

The various individual sets of records in the "poor law union" database are NOT indexed by name. While it's fascinating to browse, this decision seems a little odd - unless Ancestry are busily working away on the index behind the scenes and thought we might like to see the digitised images in the meantime. The quality of the digitised images seems pretty good through - all the original pages I viewed were nice and clear with good contrast.

I'm being very long-winded tonight, but another opinion that I was reminded of again while looking at these databases - "London, England, Deaths and Burials, 1834-1938" sounds descriptive but in fact is massively misleading. It's a very selective subset of that generic description that is actually contained in that database, and I shouldn't have to browse all the way down to the database then expand the description of the database, and then browse further into the records of the database itself to figure that out, and verify the exact scope and nature of what's really in there. And if, a year from now, I'm puttering around on Ancestry trying to find the database from the LMA that had workhouse deaths, I'm not going to necessarily spot this in a long list of databases and and know that it's probably the right one. There appears to be no way to identify the "partnering" archives organisation, or search by the partnering organisation to identify "their" databases. As the partnering approach is becoming more common these days, that seems pretty unhelpful.

So, a challenge - are there any genealogical sites out there that have done an excellent job of their "card catalogue" so that the time spent to identify relevant databases/collections is minimised? Ancestry has improved recently with its new filtering options in their card catalogue, but the information in the results screen once the filtering kicks in seems more about showing off how many records they have rather than helping me identify if those records are actually of use. I've already paid for a subscription, I don't need the very generic marketing pitch - the more specific you are, the easier it is for me to find relevant information and see the value of remaining a subscriber.

London Metropolitan Archives records at Ancestry

Hurrah - the first sets of records from the joint project between London Metropolitan Archives and Ancestry are now available, so I'm off to explore! As well as your "generic" London-based ancestors (I know you probably all have some of those), many Wing people gravitated to greater London towards the turn of the century so I'm hoping we'll all find something of interest in these records.

This release is taken from the Poor Law Records for the boroughs of Camden (poor law unions of Hampstead, Holborn, St Pancras), Islington (Islington), Lambeth (Lambeth), Southwark (Southwark), Tower Hamlets (Poplar, Stepney), Wandsworth (Wandsworth) and Westminster (Paddington, Marylebone and Westminster). The release includes miscellaneous poor law records as well as births, baptisms, deaths and burials found in those records. The years included varies in each of the three databases but is approximately from 1840 to 1906 or beyond.

Note that 23 out of the 35 poor law unions in London aren't represented at all in this release. According to Rossbret Institutions Website the following poor law unions are also found in London: City of London, Battersea, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Camberwell, Chelsea, Clapham, Clerkenwell, Fulham, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith, Kensington, Lewisham, Mile End, St George in the East, St Olave, St Saviour's, Shoreditch, Strand, Whitechapel, Woolwich, St George.

Left holding the baby?

Mick and Norma kindly posted a newspaper entry from 1717 on the Eng-Buckinghamshire Rootsweb mailing list today. It seems that Jane, the wife of Christopher BURROWS, had done a runner and (as was the custom, assuming you could afford it, of course) a newspaper advertisement was taken out to advise everyone that Christopher was not going to be held financially responsible for whatever his wife got up to.

According to the ad, Jane left on 10 December 1717. On 10 October 1718 William, son of Christopher Burrows, was baptised. There's no sign of Christopher in the Wing parish registers apart from this entry.

Sadly for my curiosity, the name of the man Jane eloped with was not included in the ad, so everyone involved is a bit of a mystery.