When first I began to search for my own ancestors, the Family Bible led me to Upper Boddington, a place I had unwittingly passed quite often on my journeys to and from college. It remains very much the same pretty village on the border of Oxfordshire, Warwicks and Northants that I first discovered, busy small lanes, lined with thatched roofs and georgian houses and cottages, many of them in very poor repair - though now, nearly ten years later, a great deal of restoration and rebuilding has been carried out. The first searches took me back to John Luckcuck, the village blacksmith, who married Sarah Goodwin, daughter of the grocer in Lower Boddington, at the village church here, on April 8th 1776. As they looked out from the church porch, their view was probably much the same as today, if we may pardon the finer detail of telephone lines and TV aerials......
The Church of St. John the Baptist at Upper Boddington stands high above the lane, looking our across rural Warwickshire. Left, a rather dark image looking east up at the church from the steep pathway climbing from the gate You can just make out the church clock; below it is a fine old tower door pictured later...
Above - The South side of the Church looking west-ish
The Church Porch (it is on the South side) St. John the Baptist Upper Boddington
<< Left St. John's Tower Door - (faces West) must have been battered by centuries of the damp prevailing winds
From the Church gate, the tower just visible on the right and to the left, the old Vicarage
The Churchyard, south and east of the Chancel Near here, centre right of this picture, is a flat gravestone commemorating members of the Goodwin family, but I cannot yet decipher much of the inscription!!
Turn left from the last picture (above) and the lane squeezes past the Village shop (thatched on right)
Follow that lane past the shop, and the church school on the left, to this crossroads; go straight over - the cottage in the distance at the top of Frog Lane.
And there.... Is the old Forge, which according to its present owner who consulted the deeds, almost certainly actually was the old Village Smithy, although the building has been partly rebuilt over the area of the former outhouses/workshop, and modernised.
<<Left
When I called last, in 1999, the cottage was for sale. How odd it would have been to buy a cottage where your great, great great..etc grandfather had lived and worked in 1776....