Kingston Bagpuize is about five miles west of Abingdon in the Vale of the White Horse. At the time of our ancestors it was a small estate village in Berkshire. In 1971, because of expansion between Kingston Bagpuize and the next door village of Southmoor, the two villages merged to become Kingston Bagpuize with Southmoor. Following the local government reorganisation of 1973, the village, along with others in the Vale, was transferred to Oxfordshire and now has a population of about 2000.
Fifteen of our ancestors lived some or all of their lives in the village. The first of our ancestors in the village were Joseph Belcher and Dorothy Holder. The North Hinksey parish records show that they were married there on 20 May 1678. On 2 July 1678 their first child, Mary, was baptised in Kingston Bagpuize. There were eight more children, all baptised in Kingston Bagpuize. The Kingston Bagpuize parish records show that they were both buried there, Dorothy on 3 Sep 1709 and Joseph on 18 Aug 1729. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that they settled in Kingston Bagpuize sometime between May and July 1678 and lived there for the rest of their lives.
The first Jeffries in the village was Henry who probably arrived in the 1790s. On Christmas Day 1798 he married Ann Belcher, although the marriage took place about a mile away in Fyfield, because the church at Kingston Bagpuize was being rebuilt.
The last two of our ancestors to live in the village were Elizabeth Jeffries (née Bason) and her son George. Elizabeth probably left to live with her daughter in Longworth after her husband died in 1879 and George moved his family to Surrey about 1880. The association of our ancestors with the village therefore lasted about 200 years, and there were other family members in the village up to 1924.
The last family members in the village were the sometime sub-postmaster, James Henry Jeffries and his wife Mary Bestley. James was the son of Moses Jeffries and Ann Maria Joyce, the sometime post mistress, and the grandson of Henry Jeffries and Ann Belcher.
But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss
Of quiet;-Look! adown the dusk hillside,
A troop of Oxford Hunters going home,
As in old days, jovial and talking, ride!
From hunting with the Berkshire hounds* they come...
* This is probably the Old Berkshire Hunt, which was based at Kingston Bagpuize up until 1935. See also Fred Holland, Huntsman, on Jill Muir's site.
Plenty of information about the village, past and present, can be found on these sites -