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!

Wing football team 1928

Occasionally you receive exciting mail and today was one of those days. Thanks to the lovely Barbara in the US, I now have a newspaper clipping about the Wing football team of 1927/8! This photo was published in the Leighton Buzzard Observer in February 1988:

Wing football team 1927/28

A letter from Joe Brand of Wantage Close was subsequently published - the sole surviving member of the group at that time, he named the men as follows:

Back row standing: P Paxton (trainer), W Corbett, W Woolhead, L Pitchford, E Gates, Joe Brand, G Woodwards, Mr Osborne (chairman), landlord of the Dove Inn [which you can see in the background] P Janes, and L Corbett (secretary).

Middle row seated: J Corbett (linesman), B Roper, W Rowe, V Woodwards, and Mr Fowler of Aylesbury (referee).

Front row seated: M Bolton, L Bandy, W Hounslow, O Horne, and F Rickard.

The team had won the Marsworth Cup a week or two previously. Well done, lads!

WW1 servicemen - an update

No, not an update to the website yet, but here's why....

My list of Wing's WW1 servicemen on the website had around 125 men. My offline list of Wing's WW1 servicemen currently has around 360. As I've said before, I may be some time researching.

I have around 20 pairs of men where their names are similar. Some of these will be because they are, in fact, the same man, so my next step is to look specifically at these pairs to see if I can conclusively prove they are the same man and therefore combine their records, or alternatively conclusively prove they are not the same man so I can plough on researching them both. Guess which outcome I'm hoping for?

Clergy information

I've annotated the new Clergy of All Saints Church page with links to some of their entries in The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 website - will try and hunt the rest down later.
 
I'm also using up some credits I have at the British Newspaper Archive ("using up" makes it sounds like work, when it is in fact glorious and fun), and came across a brief newspaper report of a case brought against labourer John BULL for setting snares on the farm on John PRENTICE. William MORGAN is named as gamekeeper so I have added William to the writeup of Waterloo Farm on the Ascott Farms page.

1332 Lay Subsidies

New page on the website this afternoon- the 1332 lay subsidies have been added (why yes, I did get inspired by the tax Hangout) - a little something for those of you with very early connections with Wing.

Domesday Book

I've just attended the Society for One-Place Studies HangoutOnAir on taxes. Often the benefit of tax records is not the tax itself, but the additional information, the roll-call of residents who met the criteria for the tax, the relative wealth of those individuals based on their relative tax bill, the changing property sizes, and so on. It's a great talk, so do go and watch it.

As a result I was inspired to move the entry for the 1086 Domesday Book for Wing and Crafton from the Gazetteers page to its own page within my new Rolls, Polls and Taxes section, and added an image of the entry from the book itself. Kim of the Bratton Clovelly OPS highlighted a book with methodology for roughly calculating population from the headcount mentioned in the Domesday Book so I'm keen to get my hands on that book and see what number I come up with!