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?→
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→
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.
One of the organisations from which we gather research material is the Family Origin Name Survey. This is an excellent service, which has set out to collect all types of documentary material and to search documents for occurrences of particular names. Among the recent references we have received from FONS, are several which we are still trying to identify. If anyone can help, or would like to research these mysterious Lin(d)fields further, do please let us know. Continue reading Recent Discoveries→
We have often referred in this journal to the work of Harry Stanford Smith, the Brighton estate agent who researched his Linfield origins during the 1950’s. He left us with some fascinating pieces of information, but since he failed to include records of his sources, we cannot readily see what is fact and what is merely conjecture in his extensive findings. Even if all the names and dates which he quoted were in fact correct, the relationships between individuals are unlikely to be confirmed by documentary evidence and some conjecture is therefore inevitable. Continue reading The Early Linfields→
The 1995 International Humour Conference is being held at the University of Aston, Birmingham from July 31st to August 4th. Our President, Eric Linfield, has been invited to present a paper on the LINFIELD LIBRARY OF HUMOUR, his collection of books now on loan to the University of Kent Centre for the Study of Cartoon and Caricature. It has been assembled over the last forty or more years as the result of two major influences – his parents’ love of laughter and their sense of humour and his decision to focus his dilettante book collecting passion on one major topic; whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge, 1948-51, he decided to concentrate on humour in all its manifestations. There are some similar collections at San Francisco Public Library, California and at the University of Cork, Eire. Continue reading The Linfield Library of Humour→
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”
When Longfellow wrote these famous lines, I doubt that he was thinking of family history; however, there is no doubt that we all leave some “footprints on the sands of time”, whether or not our lives are sublime! Some of these footprints only come to light after we have departed this life, and amongst the more useful are the contents of wills and administrations. For this reason, one of our first tasks on setting up the Group, was to transcribe the probate records held at Somerset House, which cover the period from 1858 to the present. We have now published the contents of the Calendar of Wills for the Linfield and Lindfield surnames from 1858-1920, which number 62 entries, or an average of exactly one for each year. (Ref 1) Continue reading Sands of Time→
Mary Ellmore has lucidly described the immediate ancestry of Ann Caesar who married William Linfield in 1850. But what are the origins of this family and how did they adopt such an extraordinary surname? Continue reading The Origin of the Caesars→
Researching Linfield, Lindfield, Lingfield, Linkfield, Linville and variants worldwide