Adding local information to a family past

 

                       Some books about Northamptonshire including the Kettering Vestry Minutes

I love books so when I got into family history many years ago, besides the novels that I wanted to read, I also bought books about the places where my family had lived. The trouble is that they lived in a lot of places. I have a whole large section on London, for instance. But they lived in other places too. One of those was Kettering in Northamptonshire.

Kettering was where my 3 x great grandfather, John Strange, and his family lived. He had been born there in 1790. So when I found a copy of the Kettering Vestry Minutes: 1797-1853 for sale, I purchased it. My hope was that it would give me an idea about what kind of place Kettering was when he lived there. To me vestry minutes meant the minutes of the parish or established church. I highly doubted that my Strange family would be found in there.

John was the grandson of Reverend Thomas Strange, the first Congregational minister in Kilsby, Northamptonshire. It didn't seem likely that the Strange family would have converted to Anglicanism, not in Northamptonshire where nonconformity was rife.

I was happily surprised to find John Strange showing up when I browsed through the entries. In an entry made about September 22, 1831, it was recorded that Mr. John Strange was appointed but he got off by pleading illness. That didn't last long because he was recorded as being present for the Vestry on November 14 of the same year. A number of other entries recording his name were sprinkled throughout the book. 

To settle my confusion over the religious issue, I finally looked at the introduction to the book. There I read that the various officers of the parish came from among the ratepayers. So being part of the Vestry wasn't about religion. It was about the parish as a unit of government. John Strange had been called to perform his civic duty. It gave me an idea of his status in the community. 

Beyond that, the introduction made for good background reading. It gave an interesting insight into life in that time period as there were other passages that detailed the problems the people were up against in that era. It's amazing what can be found to add colour to the lives of the family on a family tree if you bother to read a source thoroughly. 

Sources:

Kettering Vestry Minutes: A.D. 1797-1853, printed for the Northamptonshire Record Society by the Northamptonshire Printing and Publishing Company, Ltd., Kettering, 1933