SOMETIMES I feel we family historians can get a bit too blase in our discoveries. I feel sure many of you, like me, must on occasions have noted down some sparse details from an old document such as a parish register and wondered at the real human drama and tragedy that lay behind the event so barely described. I was at the Society of Genealogists Library in London yesterday, combing through the printed parish registers of Kirkby Malham, a village in the Yorkshire Dales where I had many ancestors, when I came across this very sad series of successive entries in the burial registers for Christmas Day in the year 1676..... "Daniell Booth and Ailice his wife, vagrantes (sic, as spelt), bur'd ye 25th of December." "Jeremiah Sleddin, son of ye said Ailice, buried ye same day." "John, Dorothy and Sarah, children of the saide Daniell Booth. All Six perished and were buried ye 25th of December." Although they were nothing to do with me, I could not resist writing down these entries and wondering at the awesome tragedy of it all - an entire family of six, father, mother and four children, apparently vagrants (gipsies?), wiped out and all buried together on Christmas Day 1676. What could have caused this awful business? There is no further explanation, no description of what lay behind the one word "Perished". Clearly, they all died together on or just before Christmas Day in some incident, but did they die in an accident or of disease, did they all drown, or were they frozen to death in a particularly cruel winter? There are other burial entries around the date but no special note to suggest there was an epidemic of any kind in the parish at that time. You might have thought the vicar would have given a few words of explanation for such a tragedy, wouldn't you? Or being vagrants, perhaps they were not thought of any consequence. Since I posted this on the Yorkshire list, a friend of mine has discovered from a book of old agricultural records that in the winter of 1676 wheat prices were high and there was dense fog in October, followed by heavy snow from December 10th onwards. Thus, my speculation is that this poor family all died from a combination of starvation, exposure to the cold, as they were obviously homeless, and hypothermia. I expect some of you are wondering, where was the Poor Law Relief system? I should explain that an Act in 1662 - the Act of Settlement - set out the ways in which a poor person could claim to be legally settled. Anyone entering a parish to occupy a property worth less than £10 could be challenged by the Overseers of the Poor and asked to supply some kind of indemnity against becoming chargeable to the parish. Those who could prove a right to settlement in a particular parish were given Settlement Certificates (these, of course, can be very valuable documents in family history) and under the Act they could be removed by the Justices of the Peace and Constables back to the parish for which their certificates of legal settlement applied. A vagrant family might well have been unable to obtain Settlement Certificates for anywhere, thus they would be simply moved on from one parish to the next, as none wanted to take financial responsibility for them. Times were hard then!!! Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society Web page:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)