Holly Tree Farm, Pilsley One-Place Study

When I met my future husband back in 1981, he was living with his parents on their farm in a village a few miles from my home; we still live locally now. The farmhouse is lovely, four hundred-ish years old, with beams, thick stone walls and a huge fireplace. My hubby and his brother inherited the farm following the very sad loss of my father-in-law in 2014 and we made the decision to sell the house and land – apart from one field which we kept to rent out in the future.

The solicitor kindly gave me copies of the deeds he held, disappointingly only dating back to 1902, but I was excited to see who some of the previous owners had been. I built a ‘quick & dirty’ tree for the house, including Census returns and birth, marriage and death information for the owners and then put it to one side. I didn’t want to trace their trees backwards, I just wanted information from around the time they occupied the house.

A few years later, whilst researching a branch of my own family tree, I discovered that I had a direct link to the house and field myself. A very strange coincidence, I had no idea that I had any connections in the area at all!

So I started looking at the farm in more detail, at the families and also the changes that have taken place.