Bishops Nympton Parish Register - 5 Jan 2009

The Banns are now transcribed up to 1767 which means I have now done the banns for John Pincombe and Mary Charlie (sp). Up until 1766 the Vicar Lemuel Griffiths kept beautiful records mentioning occupation for the groom but the priest changed at the end of 1766 and the records have less information. I would dearly have loved to see how Mary Charlie (sp) would have signed her own name on her marriage registration but the next priest opted for having the "bride" sign with her new husband's surname. Transcribing this register is fairly straightforward now as the handwriting is very similar to the present day in terms of formation of letters. The names of the villages/towns are similar to the present day with some exceptions. Nymett is still being used instead of Nympton.

We continued to watch Cranford and concluded the five issues. A really interesting series about life in England in 1842-43. Sudden death, wonderful happenings occur rapidly and on the same day on occasion. Life was so violent, so calm and so predictable in this time frame. I especially enjoyed it as all but one line of my ancestors were living in various parts of England at this time (many of them were farmers but one in particular ran a restaurant (eating place) at Birmingham). On his daughter's marriage registration he was listed as a gentleman and the series gives me a better idea of what his shop may have been like and the kind of person he may have been although we do not experience a large city in this series but do hear about Manchester which is only 12 miles away from this village.

A walk around the large block near us (2.5 kilometres) was a pleasant way to spend another 45 minutes in the afternoon. We have lots of snow still even after the thaw. The thaw simply compacts it down, forms an ice layer which takes quite a while in the spring to thaw but waters the ground well into the summer here.

Bishops Nympton Parish Register - 4 Jan 2009

I completed the marriage registrations for Bishops Nympton to 1812 and started the Banns (up to 1760 now). Again I am using cut and paste which means just typing in the personal information and saves me quite a bit of time. But the details are often quite interesting for my personal lines and for my one name Pincombe study so I sometimes get "off topic" and spend time entering details into my studies.

I added my fiche to my ongoing list of sources that I want to send to the Anglican Archives. I offered to do work for them as a volunteer so just need to let them know the records that I hold. I still need to list all of my books and I have managed to acquire quite a few of those as well. I have more fiche coming and want to order Hampshire and Wiltshire fiche one of these days.

I pulled out my CG application and will submit that to begin my one year of study and submission. I want to do this to give more support to my work on my family tree and to begin to submit articles to more journals since I have discovered some interesting publishable tidbits. I will proofread the Lanercost Protestation Returns and write up a preamble and short history to go with it so I can submit that to the Cumbria Family History Society Journal. The time passes very quickly these days but will be a little quieter by mid January.

Other than my fiche transcription on Bishops Nympton, I continued revising my webpage by neatening up the spacing so it is more consistent. I also revised some of the entries so that they only fill one page. Just Routledge runs over now and it is hard to get around that one since I have both of my 3x great grandparents as Routledge and their lines back that each include three Routledge lines or more (3 of my 4x great grandparents in this line are also Routledge). I neatened up the Blake preamble and put in a divider between the Hampshire Blake information and the Wiltshire Blake information. I have not proven the Wiltshire line at all yet and it is solely from published works (mostly American descendants of William Blake the emigrant in 1635 from Pitminster Somerset).

We watched Cranford a BBC production on life in this village in 1842. The characters remind me of my families although I am remembering them from the 1950s and 1960s but I think rapid change came with my generation whereas their generations were more like their parents. We purchased a number of DVD sets this Christmas which will give us over 30 hours of watching. We generally set aside two to three hours in the afternoon for our TV watching pleasure so it will be a while before we have gone through everything once and these DVDs are so good that I think we will watching them several times this winter so as not to miss all the little extra bits that are there and you miss them the first time through.