Wordless Wednesday is a daily blogging prompt sponsered by Geneabloggers Share:
You might also like:Wordless Wednesday – Elsie Mae (Ebert) VarrieurWordless Wednesday – 22 September 1962Wordless Wednesday: A headache in the making…
|
|||||
  |
 I had a chance to visit St Aldates Church in Oxford City this summer, but was disappointed to discover few grave markers remain, and those that do are too worn by weather and time to read. So, I suppose, this might be the grave of one of my Collcutt or Collins ancestors who lived in the neighborhood near the church for a few hundred years, as far back as the early 1600s. You never know. As with the many other churches tucked into the city, St Aldate’s churchyard is now a popular hangout for college students and other locals. Although I suspect the dead themselves are still at rest underground, their grave markers are mostly gone now; in St Aldate’s case, a token five have been moved closer to the church wall and arranged in an artful, arching way. They too are completely illegible and unfortunately St Aldates is not one (…more) 
Taken at a wedding in Northampton, England: Jean (Turner) Barker to the left; Gladys (Turner) Lee to the right; their Mum, Lorrie Esther (Baker) Turner at center. (Wordless Wednesday is a daily blogging prompt sponsered by Geneabloggers) Share: You might also like:Mystery Monday: Wedding Photo IDWordless Wednesday – Elsie Mae (Ebert) VarrieurSurname Saturday: TURNER of Reading and Caversham  And will it help my Denchfield problem? Having exhausted parish registers and probate records, and followed the land records as far as they could take me, I’ve got a much better sense of who was who among the many Denchfields of North Marston and surrounding villages; however, there are still some holes. As active in the community as this family was, with lives quite well documented, there are still a couple of elusive characters who seem to have mysteriously fallen from the face of the earth, or at least Buckinghamshire’s corner of it: • Richard Denchfield, baptized in North Marston on 13 February 1637, eldest son of Mathew. Richard was alive in 1660, when Mathew wrote his will, by which Richard stood to inherit half of the family’s homestead. He is mentioned again at the probate of brother John’s estate in 1689, having been asked by his brother to help (…more)  Henry Turner Harry Turner was my 3rd Great Grandfather. He was a master baker in Caversham, Oxfordshire – at one point employed by Huntley & Palmer Biscuits across the bridge in Reading. In the early years of his marriage to Louisa Smith, he was victualler of the Tudor Arms Pub on Greyfriar’s Road in Reading St. Lawrence. 1. Henry “Harry” TURNER: born 1 Jun 1848 in Reading St Giles, Berkshire; died of tuberculosis on 7 Nov 1903 in Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire. 2. Charles TURNER: baptized 4 Jul 1819 in Caversham, Oxfordshire; married 6 Sep 1845 in Thatcham, Berkshire; died 31 Aug 1901 in Caversham. Charles was a baker, with his own shop on Prospect Street. In the early days he was also a fly proprietor. 3. Ellen BROWN: baptized 20 Jul 1823 in Reading St Mary, Berkshire; died 22 Aug 1905 in Kidmore, Henley, Oxfordshire. Children of Charles (…more)  Recently I wrote about using land records to help sort out a confusing family here, and this week I’ve been applying that approach to try to sort out, once and for all, the kinships between the various Richard and John Denchfields of 17th and 18th century North Marston, Bucks. Here’s what I did: Here’s a printscreen snapshot of that chart: I love color-coding! Laying the land transactions out chronologically made everything much more cohesive and confirmed a lot of what I believed to be true based on parish records and wills. The biggest problem I have with the Denchfield kinships has to do with John Denchfield, iremonger, and his wife Parnell, whose union produced two (…more)  The Church of England began requiring the recording of baptisms, marriages, and burials in 1538 although most parishes did not begin adhering to the rules until around 1600. Still, for a family like the Denchfields of North Marston, who stayed put for the next couple hundred years or so and were important members of their community, those early parish registers are a treasure trove of genealogical gold. The registers for St. Mary’s, the established church in North Marston, date back to the late 1580s, but they are in bad shape. Before the FHL had a chance to film them, the books sustained water damage, molding the paper and smearing the ink. If that weren’t bad enough, for reasons known only to the culprit, enormous chunks were torn from each of the books, leaving one to wonder what on earth someone was trying to hide. What remained was filmed and (…more)  When John Denchfield, dairyman of North Marston, died in 1799, he left property in North Marston to his sons John and Richard. John inherited the enclosure land which had been allotted to the senior John’s father, John Denchfield, some years before. The fields were situated between the property of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Eaton. Richard, upon reaching full age, was to inherit the John’s messuage near the church, currently occupied by William Buckingham, and the messuage and close John had recently purchased from James Burnham of Winslow. The bulk of John’s estate including, presumably, the house he and his wife Mary lived in, was left jointly to Mary and son John. Sometime during the next 10 years, this Denchfield family rather inexplicitly relocated to Aston Abbotts. John’s widow Mary, in her 1809 will transcribed here, left small financial bequests to each of her children and grandchildren, with the bulk of her (…more)  A while back, I transcribed the will of Awdry Denchfield, widow of John Denchfield. From the bequests in Awdry’s will, it appears she had been the widow of a Mr. Knowles at the time of her marriage to John Denchfield, and that she was the mother of at least three daughters and one son: From other records, I was able to infer that John and Awdry’s marriage must have taken place after 1677, but the marriage is not recorded in the parish registers for North Marston, where the couple lived until John’s death in 1689, nor did it turn up in a search on FamilySearch. The Buckinghamshire Family History Society ran a search on Denchfield, and its many variants, in their database of marriages from all extant parishes in Buckinghamshire, with no success. (…more)  Awaking this morning to the first snowfall of the season and the accompanying groans of my children getting ready for the windy walk up the hill to the bus stop, it occurred to me that a trip to somewhere warm this Spring Break might be a nice idea; however, while others in my house are day dreaming of being somewhere tropical on April 2, 2012, I’m thinking only about the need to choose a hotel with free Wi-Fi. April 2nd, the day the 1940 census is officially unveiled to the public on Archives.com , is not a day I plan to spend anywhere else but in front of my laptop. Needless to say, I am holding off mentioning this to the rest of the family—the ones who get that glaze-of-the-eyes look at the mere mention of the word census. Still, it’s never too early to make a plan! UPDATE: The (…more) |
       |
|||
|
Copyright © Claire Butler and mahoganybox.net, 2013. |
|||||
Featured Posts