About Ringstead and these books
This site gathers the local and family history of Ringstead, a village in Northamptonshire, as recorded over many years by David Ball. His books tell the lives of the ordinary people of the village — nineteenth-century labourers, shoemakers, shopkeepers and emigrants, and the men who went away to the First World War — and this archive brings them together to read freely online.
Where is Ringstead?
Ringstead is a village and civil parish on the River Nene, in North Northamptonshire, England. It lies about 15 miles north-east of Northampton and roughly two and a half miles south-west of the market town of Thrapston, in the gentle valley landscape of the Nene between Wellingborough and Oundle.
For centuries it was a working agricultural village, sustained by the land, by lacemaking, and — in common with much of this corner of Northamptonshire — by the boot and shoe trade. The railway between Northampton and Peterborough once ran beside it, carrying villagers out into a wider world. In the late nineteenth century the parish was home to around 950 people. At its heart stands the parish church of St Mary, an Early English building thoroughly restored in 1863, and today the surrounding water meadows and former gravel pits — including Kinewell Lake — form part of the protected wetland of the Upper Nene valley.
Why David Ball wrote these books
David Ball did not grow up in Ringstead — he was raised in Wellingborough, a few miles away — but the village is in his blood. As he put it, “most of my father’s ancestors came from Ringstead in all branches.” Tracing those ancestors through parish registers, census returns and record offices drew him into the lives of the whole village, not just his own family, and the research grew into a set of books.
The work began, fittingly, online. The stories first appeared on a website before David collected and finished them in print:
“This book started life as a website. I loved the ability to post stories in an unfinished state which people could correct and respond to. I am still old-fashioned enough, however, to think that the information needs to be put into a book before it is really finished.”
Behind the genealogy is a simple conviction: that the people of the past deserve to be seen as real, and that remembering them is part of the health of a place.
“When you wander along the streets you may see the people who once lived in the houses, or kept the shops, taught in the school or worked in the fields, preached in the church or chapel, or served at the inn. … Do not see peeling gravestones but the villagers, the real breathing, fallible people, whose lives ended there. A community needs a vibrant present but also a proud past.”
The same impulse runs through his volumes on the men of Ringstead who served in the Great War. There the aim is remembrance — restoring individual lives to the names on the war memorial:
“We tend to remember the dead of the First World War by neat white headstones and memorials. We can forget that they were ordinary young men, many of whom would not have travelled outside Northamptonshire. … These young men, many of whom would not be granted the right to vote until 1918, should be remembered by us all.”
About the books
David Ball’s research spans several volumes, written and published between 2011 and 2021. They fall into three strands:
- Ringstead People (2011), Ringstead People 2 (2013) and Ringstead People: Final Stories (2021) — the lives of nineteenth-century villagers, from farm labourers and lacemakers to those who emigrated to the New World and back.
- The Great War 1914–18: Ringstead Men Who Served, in two volumes — A–M (2020) and N–Z (2021) — short biographies of the village’s servicemen, drawn from census records, service papers, the Absent Voters’ Lists, newspapers and family memories.
- Ringstead Men who Joined the Army and Navy (2018) and the personal memoir My Family — further military lives, and David’s own family story.
The books draw throughout on the parish registers of Ringstead and its neighbouring villages, the census returns, the Northamptonshire Record Office, the National Archives, and the generosity of Ringstead families and local heritage groups who shared photographs and memories.
The first complete book on this site is The Great War 1914–18: Ringstead Men Who Served, N–Z, with the other volumes being added over time. You can browse the library or search across the chapters using the box at the top of the page.
David always saw the books as the start of a conversation rather than the last word, hoping “that other records will come to light, and families will add their own stories.” If you have information, photographs or corrections to add, this archive is offered in that same spirit.