Motor omnibus

You'll be delighted to know that by 1928 motor omnibuses now passed through Wing, ready to transport our (relatively recent) ancestors to Leighton Buzzard, Winslow and Aylesbury!

I'm transcribing the 1928 Kelly's directory. Four years earlier the directory made no mention of such exciting conveyances. I assume carriers William BONE and Mrs Julia LOVELL were still doing things the old fashioned way though.

Military men

It seems to me that the Military Men page is getting a bit unwieldy, so I'm going to be reorganising it over the next wee while - it's getting busy already in the leadup to Christmas so I can't guarantee you'll see the revamped pages until early next year! I'm planning to have separate pages for those men serving in WWI, WWII, then all the others. I think that'll strike the right balance between having room to move and not having to look at too many pages in search of men from your families.

This does of course mean I'll have a bit more space to expand on each entry - if I have the information to hand - so if you have something to add on any of the men please let me know.

Incidentally I'm feeling very "vintage" at the moment, reading books about the RAF in WWII and, on a more girly note, learning all about hairstyles of that era (yes I am too young to have been there done that). My first attempt at pincurls certainly attracted attention at work today!

Isn't it ironic

I've been busily working on transcribing the next volume of baptisms for the website. These cover the 1837 to 1869 period - 1216 entries so it's taking a while! I had transcribed them all, and was about an hour's worth of time away from finishing checking them, but alas someone else has ordered the film so it's had to be sent back and my little project will have to wait until next year!

So if you'd just ordered 1042446 through your local LDS family history centre, hello there and I hope you find what you're looking for!

I won't be putting the transcriptions up on the website until they're checked but I'm happy to do lookups in it in the meantime, so feel free to email me about baptisms 1837 to 1869 (or burials 1833 to 1845 as I also have those transcribed but unchecked).

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.....

Zelinda

On 4 Dec 1859 William and Martha DIMMOCK of Littleworth baptised their new daughter Emmiline Zelinda. This obviously sounded like a nice name to Bernard and Dinah BOLTON (also living in Littleworth), whose daughter Minnie was being baptised on the same day and was also given the middle name Zelinda!

Apparently it's Italian in origin. Has anyone got any theories as to how those in Wing came to hear of it?

Delete buttons are dangerous

USB drives are great - except for the fact they don't have recycle bins, which means if you have accidentally highlighted a whole directory instead of the one file you wanted everything goes into the great digital recycle bin in the sky.

If you are stupid enough to compound this distressing event by using a file recovery program to restore one of those files to the original directory name, and forgetting in your panic that this eliminates your chances of subsequently getting back any of the other files that would have been in that directory, you can't really do anything but kick yourself (and cry quietly to your blog).

Suffice to say, my transcription of the 1891 census is safely recovered but everything else in my "genealogical working directory" that I had worked on over the last couple of days is gone.

Out of steam

I'm up to 1848 in the baptisms, but the enthusiasm is starting to wane a bit......376 entries down, only 840 in this volume to go!