The Wansdyke & District Forums

I wonder if the brains trust can help. I have been doing my family tree for years and one branch, the Tuckers, are recorded in the parish registers as of Stowell right through the 1700s, marriages, baptisms, burials, the lot. But there is no Stowell on the modern map, not as a village. There is a Stowell Farm and a Stowell Park, but where did the people go? There must have been forty Tuckers christened there. You cannot baptise forty children in a field.

You can if there was a church there once, Brenda, and there very likely was. A Park name often marks an emparked village, one cleared so a landowner could have his deer or his view. The people were moved, sometimes to a new model village at the gates, sometimes simply turned off. Your Tuckers will reappear in a neighbouring parish's registers at about the date Stowell vanishes from yours; that is how you trace them. Look at the parishes within a few miles and watch for a sudden influx of Tuckers. The registers remember the people even when the map forgets the place.

Mrs Astley you are a marvel. I went and looked and there they are, a whole crop of Tuckers turning up at the next parish over from about 1760, which is exactly when Stowell goes quiet in my registers. Emparked. The poor souls were cleared out for somebody's view. It does make you cross, even at this distance of years.

It does doesnt it Brenda. My own grandmother always said her people were moved when the big house wanted the land and they never forgave it, generations after they still wouldnt take work up at the house. Funny how a thing like that stays in a family long after nobody can say what house it even was.