Bells and Smells

Last Saturday saw the annual meeting of the local district of the bell-ringing association that I'd re-joined last winter upon my retirement.  This took the usual form of a period of ringing before and after a formal sequence, comprising a service in the church where we had gathered, a very filling tea in the village hall and the meeting itself while we were still gathered in warmth of the hall.  Once the necessary reports had been received and officers appointed - or, in great measure, re-appointed - we emerged into the cool evening air to the discovery that the village had no street lighting.

As I headed for the door a voice hailed me, "Are you going back to the cars?" (These had all been parked on the roadside outside the church, a few hundred yards away.)  I said that I was.  "Do you have a torch?"  "No," I replied, "but you're welcome to stumble along with me if you like."  The woman who had quizzed me decided this was an offer too good to miss, and we must have caused both anxiety and amusement to passing motorists as we made our way by the beam of their headlights and little else, trying to avoid traffic on one side and a muddy verge on the other.

The foregoing highlight apart, the week has offered little excitement - not even the drama of serious winter weather, despite all the gloomy forecasts at the beginning of the week.  I hadn't planned to bore my readers with another genealogical post this week but, if I'm honest, I've been doing little else.   At least this one is a bit different.  You may recall that, during the latter months of last year, I had been researching the families of my father's two eldest brothers' wives, one of whom I had never met, and the other who had died in the 1970s.  The former of these two had spent her whole life in Derbyshire and, during last Spring, I had coupled a short break staying with my cousin in the next shire with a visit to the County Record Office in Matlock.  She knew that I wanted a few more details that I'd said were only to be found there, and so had suggested a few weeks ago that I might like to repeat the exercise early in the New Year.

Having made sure that my preparations were complete, and that I had all the background information I would need, I set off on Thursday, despite the weather forecast indicating heavy snow that afternoon and evening.  The trip was a wet one but the rain turned to sleet for only a few minutes.  We woke up next morning to a thin coating of snow but, by the end of breakfast, this had vanished from both car and road.  My 20-mile journey over the hills was most picturesque against the stippled backdrop of the snow just tipping the ridges of the fields, and the return was completed in bright sunshine.

I had gone with a list of 30 people, all born in the one village between 1816 and 1906, for whom I sought a baptism record.  I found 29 of these, but also 26 more entries, for the complete family of the eldest of these people - a total of 11 siblings - and for many of his grandchildren, whom I hadn't listed.  The bonus was the discovery that the next register on the film contained the record of his marriage in 1840.

Once I've processed all these data, I'm hoping that I might get around to dealing with some of the glaring omissions I've recently discovered, dating from some of the earliest entries I recorded.  Many that I've found, based solely on here-say, have prompted me to think, 'did I really not look up the record for that?'  This could take some while, during which my frontiers will advance little if at all, but at least if there are any really false trails I've followed and characters I've revered as genuine relatives, they can be rooted out before they cause any more wasted hours of research (the false scents that are the 'smells' of this week's title).