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Our Family Bible
Our family bible is not very old, awarded to my Gramp in June 1901 as a Sunday School Prize. Sadly, it is about the only concrete object linking me to him; the Bible, its few loose papers and a very few photographs.
The funeral cards are the only tenuous link to my great-grandparents, but I remember huge, heavy-framed portraits of them in the farmhouse when I was a little boy; a stern faced lady with a bun and an elderly man with an enormous beard. These were thrown away after my Gramp's death, along with other items such as inlaid boxes, a Chinese lacquered screen, a Russian doll, brass bedpans and stone hotwater bottles, sacrificed due to lack of space in my Gran's new home. What I would give for those portraits now!
My Dad was only just 5 when John Thomas Gilkes died and, obviously, had few real memories of him. The picture of Dad and his sister, Freda, must have been taken at about the time of the funeral.
Sunday School was an important part of the life of most village children and the Annual Records showed how it was organised into Upper, Middle and Lower Schools, boys and girls separate, with Monitors to help the teachers.
Prizes of cash were awarded, with the Bible Prizes being the most important. What questions were there for the children to answer? A selection of monitors' papers have survived the 101 years since my grandfather sat them.
1 Why did Jesus advise his brethren to declare themselves shepherds? Where was the land of Goshen?
2 Give the Seven Words our Lord spoke upon the Cross.
3 Who was Ishmael? What did God say of his descendant, how has it been fulfilled?
There were 6 papers altogether, with 6 questions to a sheet! Quite a test.
There is a Book of Common Prayer, printed in 1820, in one branch of the family. It was originally the property of William Gilkes(1794-1862), but he left it to Thomas Gilkes(1802-1887), who left it to Edwin Gilkes(1840-1916), then to Elijah Gilkes b.1870. William had two sons, Joseph died aged 5 and George, who married Sarah Salmons in 1849. The story of George and his movement around the country is told elsewhere, but he didn't get the prayer book.
During the Great War an In Memoriam section was added, and in 1919 there was a tragic death recorded that was nothing to do with the War; I have not yet found out what caused the death. Beatrice May, as she was Baptised, Was not quite 13 years old and was the daughter of William Eales Gilkes, my Gramp's eldest brother. 
William's Prayerbook
We found a distant relative a while ago by a stroke of fortune and found that he is also interested in researching his past. We have swapped data and he has supplied us with some interesting photocopies from his family prayerbook.
The book was printed in 1820 and belonged to William Gilkes, born 1794 in Moreton Pinkney and dying, we think, in Towcester Union Workhouse in 1862. Shown below is how he marked his book, but the date is, as you can see, open to interpretation.
William married three times; first to Elizabeth Murcott of Canons Ashby on Boxing Day 1815 and then to Mary Hawtin in 1823. Finally he married Ann Salmons in Westminster in 1844. Elizabeth had died soon after having daughter Lucy, who died when she was 18. With Mary, William had four more children; 2 sons and 2 daughters. Of these, Joseph died aged 5 and the 2 girls marriages have been found, but nothing else. George went to live in Northampton with his uncle Joseph, William's younger brother, and there married Sarah Salmons at All Saints in 1849. She was the daughter of Ann Salmons, his step-mother. George and his family then set off on a journey that took them to Teddington in Middlesex. On the way, it would seem, William was 'dumped' in the workhouse in Towcester - possibly!
George did not get the prayer book, for it was passed on to his cousin Thomas, who handed it on to his son Edwin. It was important to Thomas that it remained in the hands of a Gilkes, as his impassioned lines testify.
This Book is not to go out of the Gilkes is famley for ever rote by Thomas Gilkes i leave it to Edwin Gilks if the longest lived and if not to Jhon Gilkes
The book was handed on to Edwin Gilkes and thence to his son Elijah. Edwin did live longer than his younger brother John, but only by a month. They are both buried in Bugbrooke churchyard.
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George's Inventory
Helmdon is 2.5 miles from Sulgrave and 4 miles from Moreton Pinkney. It seems likely that any Gilkes in Helmdon has a good chance of being a relative of the Gilkeses in the other two villages, but I have not been able to find any connection yet.
The first record I have been able to find in Helmdon is of the wedding of William Gilkes to Mary Chubcye on 12th October 1666. The greatgrandson of William, George, died in 1801, and left a will with an inventory of his goods and chattels. Below are 2 parts of this, reproduced for interest.
He obviously ran a mixed farm, but I have no idea of its size, but it was valued for sale at £250. George left the large sum of £100 to the 10 year old son of his niece Sarah, named Gilkes Stockley. With this money Gilkes went off to London, where he died aged 81 in The Strand. He's yet another character I'd like to find more about; it seems he may well have put his inheritance to good use.
I have tried without success to find a chart that would allow me to 'convert' the value of his will to a present day amount, but it would seem that he did very well for himself.
The Poacher I recently had an e-mail from Anne Hardy from near Durham to say that she had a connection to my tree through the Hemmings family of Moreton Pinkney. That connection came through her relationship to John Ward and his wife Mary. This was a bit of a puzzle, but Anne went on to explain that the couple were really James Hemmings and his wife Hannah Billingham, both from Moreton Pinkney and married there in 1875. James and family, then just daughter Emma, had moved to Buckby Wharf near Daventry where he was a labourer aged 25 at the 1881 census. By the next census he was at Kirkby Woodhouse, Notts and with the name John Ward. He had changed his wife's first name, but luckily not his children's first names, which made tracing the family so much easier. He was poaching on land belonging to the Spencer family and the law was closing in. It seems that the family settled down after that interesting interlude and Joseph became a miner and brought up a family of six children with Hannah. He was to die before her, but that is not surprising as she lived to the age of 95 years. Just think of the changes Hannah saw in her long life. She was born just after the end of the Crimean War, but lived through the Boer War and both World Wars as well as the Korean War. She saw the birth of radio and television and films as well as the motor car and the aeroplane. All this seen by a woman from a village which, four years before she was born, was described by Sir Henry Dryden, in a letter published in the Northampton Herald, as 'a village with a crime rate 6 times the county average' and 'the headquarters of a notorious gang of burglars'. I'd like to thank Anne Hardy for that connection and the interesting thoughts it provoked.
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