Ancestor's Village

Our ancestor Robert Carter was a resident in Shouldham Thorpe when he was arrested in 1850 for poaching and assaulting a gamekeeper. He is my g-g-grandfather. He was given a sentence of transportation for life and after three years in British prisons was shipped to Western Australia in 1854. His wife and 5 children joined him in 1859. Early in the new century family members who were living in Europe joined us for a weekend in the ancestral village. We stayed at a B&B adjacent to the church and leafed through the baptism register which is still in the Parish Chest. It was started in 1813. We were delighted to find many family names in the document. The village seems to be unchanged from the 1841 tithe documents except for some new houses built in the 1880s. The Primitive Methodist Church appears to have been built on Carter land in 1850. As a result of our visit we have updated our family tree and added to the family history. In the early 1800s there appear to have been four Carter families in the district, three of them related. We have discovered some rellies in the UK and would love to find more. There are some 5000 rellies in WA so must be many more here in UK.