London Calling
Your webmistress, Babs Deacon, crossed the pond and made an attempt to do a little in-person Nims research.
Last week, I flew to London for a little holiday and made a small excursion from my hotel in Soho to the Henry Nims parish church of St. Clement-Danes. Those of you who are following Rob del Re’s “Finding Godfrey” series on this site will remember that several Nims family events were recorded in the church records. I was eager to see the the church for myself and had reached out to Rob before the trip to see if there was any research I could do in London apart from what he and his researchers were already performing. Rob agreed that going to St. Clement-Danes might be interesting and that a wander through the burial ground, if there was one, might be useful.
The Church was about a mile from my hotel in the neighborhood known as The “Strand”. Luckily the London heat wave had dissipated and the weather was perfect. Unluckily, the church was closed for a school tour and I wasn’t able even to peek in. The staff was very apologetic but held the line on no visitors. They told me that the church is the central church of the Royal Air Force. There were indeed several RAF officer statues and engraved stones surounding the tiny church. They were not aware of the Nims family or their historic fate in Deerfield. Canadian incursions and forced marches in Winter didn’t hold much fascination for these Brits.
The church, designed by Christopher Wren, was under construction. I took two pictures of the sides that weren’t hidden by scaffolding.
St. Clement-Danes Side St. Clement-Danes Rear Burial Ground and New Inn Passage
Thankfully, there was a Pret a Manger across the street where I assuaged my feelings of frustration with coffee and a sandwich. Fortified and slightly rested, I tackled the Rob’s two small research requests: Were there any Nims in a St. Clement-Danes burial ground and could I find the New Inn Passage? I crossed back throught the tiny paved area that fronts the church and made my way through a passage marked as St. Clement Burial Ground on Apple Maps. Sadly, now a modern piazza on the campus of the London School of Economics. The LSE seemed to have swallowed up much of the area North of the church. Additionally, the New Inn Passage, shown on my Apple Maps app, was part of the campus.
I really should have gone off in search of the other Nims’ records church, St. Botolph’s, but I was running out of time that day. I realized when I got home that I had saved a piece of information to my phone from a Wikipedia article about William Blaxton “One of Johnson's last official acts as the leader of the Charlestown community before dying on 30 September 1630 was to name the new settlement across the river "Boston," after his hometown in Lincolnshire, from which he, his wife (namesake of the Arbella) and John Cotton had emigrated to New England.” - Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Johnson, Isaac.
So the parish saint of Henry Nims’s second wife, Elinor Denes/Davis was the basis of the name of the Lincolnshire town, Boston, which later gave its name to Boston, Massachusetts. I’m storing that one for pub trivia.
Babs Deacon