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Thank you so much for your reply. The level of detail included is crucial as, amongst other things, a fellow researcher and I are trying to identify whether a particular individual is "one of hers" or not - he has a very common name - so if in this particular instance his record contains the father's name and place of origin that would make our day! If my partner-in-crime then decides she wants to view the original documents she can go ahead and contact the BRO.

Thanks for your thoughts, Spelk. As you say the download would be far the quicker option, but I am wondering how easy it would be to search through it for particular individuals in the long term. The CD version does at least come with a fairly comprehensive index which allows one to search using either the apprentice's or master's name, or by a particular trade. I am not a fan of cloud storage, I'm afraid, though my PC does have extra memory installed, so storage is not a problem.

That's really helpful, thank you. One problem solved! I recently discovered that Jonathan had been adopted by Rachel Fane, Countess of Bath at Tawstock House in Devon, at a couple of weeks old, and she more or less brought him up, so that tallies with my findings.

After a very long time and much water under the bridge, I have revisited my Service tree, and finally discovered, via a newspaper obit for Thomas Speirs Service that I stumbled across today, that the family connection to the Duke of Roxburghe is through Robert Service, youngest brother of my John Service. Robert was apparently living in Kelso by 1914. Unfortunately, so far all I have on him at this point, is that he married an Alice/Alison Wilson at Cairnhill, Duns, in 1884, and by 1901, he was at Heiton, Roxburgh, and working as estate forester foreman. So far my searches have turned up a toll-keeper, a cattle dealer and a publican of the same name at Kelso, (oh and the Kelso Laddie!), but not my chap

Darnity, thank you so much for those links. I've spent the last half hour or so going through the 1921 sale catalogue and map on the Soulbury site, and it's been massively helpful. The Leighton Buzzard one might be able to help me to locate where exactly on Wing Road my lot were in 1911, as their house only has a name, not a number, in that year's census. I suspect that the house numbers along that road may have changed over the years, too, as they don't seem to follow a logical sequence on Google Street View.