A Trip Up't Dale

Our county library has proved its worth during the pandemic by negotiating online access  to both the Find My Past and Ancestry genealogy websites for residents from their homes. I already subscribe to Ancestry personally but North Yorkshire's own parish register archives have been uploaded to Find My Past and I thought I might give it a browse. All those hours painstakingly spent perusing microfiche copies of handwritten baptism, marriage and burial records in the County Records Office are now behind me. Not only have those records been uploaded but they have also been transcribed making both reading and searching them a doddle. Talk about information overload; the details that have eluded me came flowing in thick and fast. So much so, that I had to pause and take stock.

Several years ago, going back to before retirement, I had traced one branch of my family back to Swaledale (only a few miles from where we live now) but had hit an impasse with an illegitimate grandfather, several generations back. The problem was that whilst I knew the name of his mother, she just happened to share both her Christian and surnames with every other farmer's daughter in Yorkshire, so, short of moving my bed into the Records Office and having developed a squint from examining so much microfiche, I have given that particular line a wide berth.

Piggy backing onto other people's trees or trying to rely on the information collated by the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah is always dangerous. Sadly, many people seem to forget that Yorkshire is an enormous county with inevitably many people of the same name; that the gestation period for a human being is generally 9 months and that, depite the desire to find out that we are all related to Royalty, the truth is very different. I throw that in because somebody had my poor illegitimate great, great grandfather marrying the granddaughter of one of our more aristocratic families. Well we all want a happy ending but bearing in mind that her father was a tailor by trade and the rest of the family a mixture of butchers and skinners, what seriously were the odds? Mind somebody else had the same grandfather's mother finally marrying a widower extraordinaire; if the chap's wives really had died and given birth at the rate described in that tree, I would have had to conclude that he was conducting mass murder in the scullery.

Now, suddenly, with facts flowing onto my screen, the hazy information I had previously collated took on a life of its own and very quickly I had not only taken that branch back several more generations but successfully pinpointed the farms where they had lived and which the Ordnance Survey map confirms are still there to this day. I have managed to acquire copies of wills and letters of administration dealing with the inheritance of one of the farms and established their Parish Church for baptisms, marriages and burials.

 

The Churchyard

Our aim, of course, has been to get ourselves out on foot to view the farms which involves what will be at least a 12 mile trek over moorland. Unfortunately the weather keeps letting us down and although today dawned perfectly, the clouds soon closed in. So instead Mister E and I drove to Kirby Hill near to Richmond which is where all those big family events took place two to three hundred years ago, promising ourselves coffee from a flask once we had identified any headstones. Typical cheapskates, not only did my family get two sons born in consecutive years baptised together, but they obviously didn't want any engraved lumps of stone to preserve abiding memories either.

At least Kirby Hill is a delightful place even on a miserable July day. It has presumably been very much gentrified since my ancestors' era, although with the church dating from the 12th century, an inn from the 18th, the old grammar school from 1556 and a hospital building from 1754, I think it would still be recognisable to them. 

The Village Green

 

The inn

The hospital

The school with Church behind

Sadly coronavirus restrictions meant that the church building was closed, so we weren't able to enter and view the interior where they were presumably threatened with hellfire and brimstone in order to repent their sins before they returned shaking on foot or by waggon back to life on the vast, empty  moor.

The ancestral farms are on a ridge hidden by the cloud