A lot of rather unkind things have been written about lawyers, and anyone who has bought a house recently will probably have their own catalogue of complaints about the ponderous and bureaucratic processes for which the legal profession charges so much. On the credit side, however, legal processes tend to be very well documented and the law, both civil and criminal, has always been a rich source of material for the family historian. In this article, I will show some examples of such material as it relates to the Lin(d)field family history, concentrating on the criminal, rather than civil, proceedings. Continue reading Crime and Punishment
Archives
Bob’s Your Uncle
(Well, if not yours, he may be someone’s uncle, or at least their fifth cousin!)
From time to time, I like to check through the database for any “loose ends” in the hope of connecting them to one of the main branches. In the course of this process, I have been struck by the number of times we find the name Robert, and I thought it might be interesting to write an article which brings together all these mysterious Roberts. We can often pick up connections on the basis of naming patterns, particularly with the less common given names. Robert, whilst not an uncommon name, does not occur much in our records, and may well therefore reveal links between branches which we have not so far been able to connect. There are currently 62 records in the database for ROBERT LINFIELD; of these about 20 are identified as duplicates. If we then ignore isolated entries from the more recent past, such as telephone listings and birth registrations, we are left with around 15 records which are worthy of further investigation. Similar total numbers occur with the LINDFIELD spelling, though with only a handful of unresolved mysteries. Continue reading Bob’s Your Uncle
The Lin(d)fields of Suffolk – An Update
Introduction
A previous article (Ref. 1), included some wills, notably those of WILLIAM LYNEFIELD, Innholder of Ipswich (1585), and SAMUEL LINDFILD (1665). Summaries of the wills of GILBERT LINDFEILD, Member of Parliament for the town (1680), and of his son, also Gilbert, “gentleman” of Whatfield in Suffolk (1692), were also included. As a result of further research in the Ipswich area, we now know considerably more about this branch of the family, and the purpose of this article is to provide an account of the new information. Continue reading The Lin(d)fields of Suffolk – An Update
How Did It All Begin?
At our recent A.G.M. our President was trying to encourage us to write more for “Longshot” and he suggested we might write what he called a “living obituary”. I have to go back a very long way as I have been interested in my family history for about 70 years.
As a very little girl first staring school, I was soon to find that other children and their home lives were very different from me and mine. What this difference was seemed something of a mystery to me and I began to notice things. Young children and especially girls, can be very unkind and I resented it when one catty little girl sneered “Your father is old enough to be your grandfather!” – I adored my father and to have him slighted put my back up. Continue reading How Did It All Begin?
The Worthing Typhoid Epidemic of 1893
Some of my grandfather’s earliest memories were of the typhoid epidemic which hit Worthing in 1893. Known ever after as ‘fever year’, the terrible events which affected this seaside town on the south coast were never forgotten by the people who experienced them. Nowadays, though we still have good reason to complain about the deficiencies of the water companies, at least we are not dying from typhus or other related illnesses caused by pollution of the local water supplies. But this is exactly what happened at Worthing just over a century ago. Of the 1,500 cases reported, some 186 people died as a direct result of the infected water they had consumed. My grandfather’s family had lived in Worthing from the early 1850s, when his grandparents, WILLIAM AND ANN LINFIELD, came to the town soon after their marriage in Brighton. William was a tailor by trade and established his business in South Place, near the old Town Hall. Undoubtedly they experienced at first hand the earlier occasion in 1865 when polluted water supplies affected the town. But in its severity and scope – as many as one in ten of the local population succumbed to the disease – the outbreak in 1893 was immeasurably worse. Continue reading The Worthing Typhoid Epidemic of 1893
Longshot Vol 4, No. 2
The Worthing Typhoid Epidemic of 1893, by Malcolm Linfield
How Did it all Begin?, by Mary E. Offer
The Lin(d)fields of Suffolk – An Update, by Ian and Valerie Anderson and Malcolm Linfield
Bob’s Your Uncle?, by Alan G Lindfield
Crime and Punishment, by Alan G Lindfield
Front Cover: The young lady in our cover picture is Harriet Lilias Lindfield, born 1864, who married George Walder in 1890. Harriet was the grandmother of Beryl Chittenden, who has been a member of LONG since its foundation in 1992.