Hi Maxwell courtship - there are examples in my lot of all your suggestions: time spent in same village/town as youngsters mutual friends - one brother, born in Oxfordshire, married a girl, in her Buckinghamshire home town, (where they then lived) who his sister had worked with in London servants network - there was socialising between the servants of the various properties so he could have been working anywhere in the area within travelling distance of Chastleton. relations - this certainly happened, I have few close relations in mine but some examples that clearly show contact between what look to be far flung branches of a family. One south Yorkshire daughter marrying a distant cousin in Lancashire, another Oxfordshire one marrying a cousin in Lincolnshire. neighbours: my 3 times great grandfather married a farm servant from a neighbouring property - he was 54 at the time she was 25. They had 7 children the last one born when he was 70 causing the Vicar to make the following entry in the register: Mary Anne d Benjamin Mary Anne labourer Postcombe Bastard child Benjamin KING being upwards of 70 years of age Don't fall into the trap of thinking that 10 miles is too distant for them to have met through any of the above options - they walked long distances as a matter of course and used carts and or horses to get around too. Many of them were employed on 1 year contracts which meant that they were moving from farm to farm or house to house. Where you can track some of these families through later censuses it is surprising how far they travelled in 10 years, often in a circle. So what looks like a life long residence in one village can be proved wrong by the children's birthplaces. My mining families started in Shropshire (records back to 1590) then between 1730 and 1850 moved into Staffordshire then Derbyshire and finally Yorkshire. Wendy -----Original Message----- From: Maxwell Smith Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2011 4:55 AM To: oxfordshire@rootsweb.com Subject: [OXF] Richard Field (c.1743-1830) Hi Wendy Thanks again. Your further advice has convinced me that the servant angle (a bit of lateral thinking on my part) is not going any where. However, it is useful to know that one can't rule out a baptism record as a possibility even though it may be 30-60 miles from his residence at the time of his marriage. Does your knowledge of servant employment extend to courtship? I'm assuming that the distance of 8-10 miles between Fifield and Chastleton (bride's abode) suggests that at some time they lived at the same place or worked at the same place, or were related (second cousins etc). As for your other advice, one has to deal with the cards one is dealt with. The Field branch remained in Fifield as agricultural labourers ( as were most of the male population before the Industrial Revolution) before migrating to New South Wales in 1850. Cheers Maxwell. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OFHS Open Day - 1 October in Woodstock www.ofhs.org.uk ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to OXFORDSHIRE-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message