A Church Window...

...and why it made me sad.

A few weeks ago I blogged about Belgrave Hall not far from the centre of Leicester and yet an area with a feel of the countryside about it. Next to Belgrave Hall is a church, St Peter's Church. It is now decommissioned, unused, locked up for most of the year and that made me sad.

I can see why it has been decommissioned. There was once a bustling community living in the area and I understand that a church without a congregation is not really a church. I stood looking at the priest's vestments, all laid out on display, brightly embroidered each with different coloured threads, labelled for the particular festivals for which each would be worn. They should have been washed, pressed and awaiting their turn at a service. They made me sad.

The Chancel in St Peter's Church, Belgrave

The building has been up for sale. It didn't sell. I walked around it after my visit to Belgrave Hall and tried to imagine flats where pews have stood for centuries. Who would live with the grand stained glass window that was once part of the chancel?

The chancel window on the left is not the window that gave this post its title. 

I was far more interested in looking at a small side window. It's known as a leper's window or squint window. The sign in the church indicates that this window was installed in the Middle Ages so that priests could give Communion to the lepers as they travelled to Burton Lazars Leper Colony. Not for them the shelter and relative comfort of the pews or the beauty of the adornments. They had to stand in the churchyard, amongst reminders of their mortality. Who would incorporate this window into their lovely new flat? That thought really made me sad.

Burton Lazars is a village not far from Leicester. Inevitably there is no leper colony remaining, just the earthworks of the hospital which were uncovered in 2001 by the University of Leicester Archaeological Society. The hospital buildings were destroyed some hundred years after the Reformation but it had served the needs of lepers from the middle of the 12th century. It was founded by Roger de Mowbray and was said to be the largest leper colony in Europe. I knew nothing about it until I visited St Peter's Church and saw the window with its inscription. I apologise if the photograph is a little dark. It is in a tucked-away corner. I wonder what life might have been like for those lepers. I am determined to find out more about the lepers from Burton Lazars.

The Leper Window:

Inscription beside the window: Through this window the priest in the Middle Ages would give Communion and hear the confessions of lepers journeying to the leper colony at Burton Lazars, which was founded in 1135 by Roger de Mowbray. The stained glass is circa 19th Century

Research Footnote: I have started researching this at the local Records Office and am now wondering if this really was a window for lepers. 
1.  The Church is unlikely to have been en route to the leper colony. 
2.  Lepers would not have been welcomed where there was a large congregation. 
3.  Confessions cannot appropriately be heard through an open window in a public place. 
I am continuing to research this subject so, as they say, watch this space.

Can you research a family tree?

Project Update

Cataloging a Cemetery and researching some of the older headstones is, I have to admit, far harder than I ever expected but it is such a worthwhile task that I can forgive it all of its difficulties.

The Cemetery Entrance

We've sorted the names for the unmarked plots and now the Stone Mason is working on our order, creating plaques and row markers. Meanwhile, we've moved on to writing the information for our Website, designing Interpretation Boards for the Cemetery entrance, inputting basic data so that our Website has a fully functioning genealogical search facility and then of course there's the family research. For many of us this was the main attraction but even this is harder than I thought it would be.

You may have created your own family tree and know all about what I'm going to discuss. I hadn't and so this was a steep learning curve for me.


This is what I've learnt so far:

The first place to look is the Headstone. It should provide the date of death, age, relatives and possibly birthplace. Unfortunately, there's always the possibility that it's so old, it provides nothing more than a difficult-to-read name! 

The Censuses from 1901 and 1911 are freely available to the public now and they can give valuable information about family members and addresses. 

In the Records Office there are shelves full of local Trade Directories which provide people's names and addresses covering the last two centuries and more. They also have sections organised by trades. 

The local newspapers are on microfilm at the Records office. You need to have a good idea of what date you're looking for as they are generally not indexed which means hours of sliding screen after screen of old newspaper pages. This can take even longer than expected as there are always fascinating articles to take you off on irrelevant tangents and as for the adverts… they’re hilarious! 

Our Records Office has a Person Index for anyone who ‘hit the headlines’ during their lifetime and a lot of information can also be gleaned from Congregation/Parish records. 

We have signed up for www.ancestry.co.uk and www.findmypast.co.uk but there are a number of free family research websites. Free Births, Marriages and Deaths can be found at www.freebmd.org.uk. The National Archives catalogue is at www.nationalarchive.gov and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is at www.cwgc.org. 

Failing all that you can always try Googling a name to see if there’s anything out there.

We have until the end of October to get the project completed so I shall take another deep breath and throw myself back into ancestry.co.uk. If anyone would like to help with researching any of the names then do please let me know. This is one of those jobs that is never done! We can never have too many volunteers!

This is a Heritage Lottery Funded Project.

Learning how to research

The Heritage Lottery Funded project, Lives Behind the Stones, is moving on a pace. [I've explained more about the project here.] Last week we went to the Leicestershire and Rutland Records Office for our first training session. We are hoping to research some of the names on the stones in the oldest part of Leicester's Jewish Cemetery. We know that we will draw complete blanks with some of them but we are hoping to at least find out something of interest, though first of all we have to learn how to find our way around the myriad of resources in the Records Office.

The office is an old Victorian School House, quite appropriate for the collection of so many historical documents. Jenny Moran, the Senior Archivist, gave us an introduction followed by a guided tour. The place is packed from floor to ceiling with scrolls, maps, photographs, letters, wills, not to mention shelf after shelf of books packed with names, addresses, jobs, the list is endless. It was a fascinating experience. We were even taken into the private area, where documents are stored at about 14 degrees to prevent damage, and the vast shelves are moved to and fro by means of a hand-controlled wheel.

Jenny Moran showing us one of many sets of shelving packed with documents

 I'm sure that Agatha Christie has used just such a setting for one of her mystery murders.

As Jenny said, there's always someone who can't resist turning the wheel to move the shelf

Jenny had laid out a number of fascinating documents for us to browse including the Synagogue's marriage register dating back to the 19th Century and a number of newspapers from wartime Leicester, a time when a lot of London Jews arrived in Leicester to escape the bombing.

For the second part of the morning we considered a selection of photographs of possible headstones for research and our brave volunteers launched enthusiastically into their work. 

Will they find out about exciting life stories and produce evidence of what life was like in early 20th Century Leicester? 

We hope so. Watch this space! 

Apologies if I have not visited your blog or been on Twitter this week. A young and very dear friend died suddenly on Monday and it has been a particularly difficult time.