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Out of a crisis many wonderous things may arise!

As we were going into lockdown in 2020 I had a mysterious email from Paul Oxley.

He was in possession of a hand-written diary of a Sussex farmer written by one of his direct ancestors called Nicholas Oxley and asked would the Sussex Family History Group, of which I am Chairman, like to see it and might we be interested in its contents?

So I hastily said yes and in a few days a package arrived in the mail. Inside were two items, one unbound, the other bound.

They were a day to day dairy of someone who ran a farm in the Warbleton area of Sussex, near the border with Kent, but the writing, particularly in the older unbound section, was not straightforward to read. They covered the years 1814 to 1815 and this part was sent away to be rebound.

So that left us with a substantial part, 1816, 17, a gap until 1821, some of 1822 and then a few entries of 1823.

The real issue was that the gold, if there was any inside this diary, could only be extracted if we transcribed the dairy, so I asked our Facebook group and found I soon had a reliable collaborator, Madeline.

So, Madeline and I each transcribed a page a day and then we put comments about the transcript up on the SFHG Facebook pages. Anything from queries about places, terminology, an interesting story, parts we could not read – and I created quite a following.

We think that the early years (1814 & 1815) were written by Nicholas Oxley’s brother William and then in 1816, Nicholas took over, with an occasional cheeky comment from his brother.

Our diarist though was an odd duck indeed.