Our editor writes:
The availability of good local history publications has increased greatly in recent years both in quantity and quality. Good family historians should always research the local historical background to the lives of their ancestors. They may feel that this is difficult if the people they have discovered lived in small towns and villages but in fact local history societies and groups are to be found for almost everywhere and very many of them produce excellent booklets which provide just the background information which help family historians to increase their understanding and write up good accounts. County Records Offices and County Family History Societies may help to locate these. Guides to our English parish churches should also be traced.

Just to make my point I will cite some examples which have helped me in my own research. “Footsteps through Smalley” by J. Crofts and J. Read concerning the Derbyshire village of Smalley had a number of references to the Kyte family, from which I am descended. These included this gem:

“In 1843 John Kyte and Isaac Brown accompanied the murderer Hulme, a chimney sweep, from Smalley Justice Room to the Assizes in Derby. There he was hanged, along with his accomplices Bonsall and Bland, before a crowd of35,000 people. Their victim was an elderly lady, Martha Goddard of Stanley Hall, a cousin of John Radford. Martha’s sister had died later from her injuries inflicted by the murderers”. NB Kyte and Brown were local farmers serving that year as parish constables.

Of course we cannot always hope to find such direct references. More often it is the discovery of information which helps to build up the background to our ancestors’ lives.

An ancestor of mine, Robert Cross was station master at the Midand Railway station of Kegworth from the1870s through to his retirement in 1895. Although this station, closed in 1968, served the Leicestershire town of Kegworth, it was situated in the Nottinghamshire parish of Kingston-on-Soar. So it was that I found Brian W. Smith’s little book helpful titled “Kingston on Soar, Further Chapters in the history of an estate village”. It was clear from the book that the building of the station and the station inn related to the building of a new great house by Edward Strutt, the first Lord Belper, who moved into the estate in 1845.

“Kegworth Station was opened on 1 st July 1840. Passengers had to be at the station a quarter of an hour before the train was due to leave”.

In 1880, the second Lord Belper formed the Kingston Gypsum Company. Kegworth station was linked to the Gypsum mine by a single line standard gauge railway known as “Lord Belper’s Mineral Railway”.

“Because of increasing rail traffic the line was dueled in the early 1870s providing separate up and down lines. By 1914 nearly 300 trains-passenger, mineral and goods- ran through Kingston daily.”

From time to time local history societies produce books of real scholarship which illuminate not only the history of a locality but some important aspect our national social and economic history. In 1999, the Keyworth and district local History Society published “A Village Transformed: Keyworth 1750 - 1850”. The book deals with what happened to a Nottinghamshire parish as a result of the eighteenth century enclosure of lands. Much has been written on the upheavals of “enclosure which transformed the age old open fields throughout the country into the hedged patchwork of fields we still recognise today. Here we learn in details what happened to the owners of land and their labourers, who carried out the work and how they did it, with details of the tools employed. Family Historians can learn a great deal from Enclosure Documents and Land Tax returns from the period. One doesn’t have to have a particular interest in Keyworth or in Nottinghamshire to learn a great deal of background history from this volume. It is now available at only £2.50 from the Society.