Introduction
The South Willingham History Group has been collating data about the people who have lived in the village. This has come from various sources; census, baptism register, wedding banns register, marriage register, burial register, a list of buildings in the village, a survey of the gravestones in the graveyard and newspaper articles. This data collection is ongoing.
You can download the data, using the links below.
So far, the details of over 3000 former residents have been collected. Some appear only once, others multiple times in multiple documents.
The true picture only starts to become apparent when the data is collated so you can see a person’s role in village life, where they lived, who their family is and how they have supported each other. The data has been presented in two ways:
- A transcript of the orginal registers errors and all.
- A corrected list of residents, linked to each data source, in the database (see below).
Please note that this is work in progress. The data is still being collected. The links in the data are still being created. The list of people still contains duplicates that we have not found yet (ladies are in twice, under her maiden and married names because we have not discovered her marriage). Data anomalies and misread handwriting have yet to be resolved. Residents of particular houses have yet to be ascertained. The database still contains bugs.
The data will be updated about twice a year. Latest version is July 2019.
The Index
A comprehensive index of the South Willingham residents can be downloaded here. We suggest you use this PDF first; if you can see the person you are looking for in that index, then download the database.
The index is comprehensive in that people appear in it multiple times to allow them to be found easily. For instance, if a lady has married 3 times, she will appear in this index under her maiden name and all 3 married surnames. Also, if that lady does not like her first forename, and we know that she refers to herself by her middle name, she will appear in this index under both first and middle names for each surname. So in this example she will have one record in the database but will appear 8 times in this index.
The Database
This archive contains two files one showing how the data is displayed “the front end” SW_History_Database.accdb and a second containing all the data “the back end” SW_History_PublishedBE.accdb. The two files need to be joined to use the data see getting started.