Ash was brought from Sydenham in 1891 and the last to be buried at Stansted from Hampstead in 1918. Amongst others who remained in their old haunts was Thomas Walter, a younger brother of Henry, who lived on in Ash into the present century. Thomas spent many years of his long life at the quaintly named Nightingale-hall. In 1851, when things were bad, he was there as an agricultural labourer but later he became and continued a gamekeeper. On his death in 1904 they took him back to his native Stansted,. where his age was recorded in the Burial register as eighty-six ‘plus 356 days’. His wife Elizabeth did marginally better; she had reached eighty-seven before, in 1915, she joined him in Stansted churchyard.¹¹
   Families who first appear in the registers during the seventeenth century and whose names still recur a hundred or more years later include those of Ashenden, Jest, Brooker, Dalton, Edmeads, French, Glover, Jarret, Letchford, Miller, Munnes, Oliver, Rabson, Salmon, Stacey or Stacie,¹²  Thorpe, Wallis or Wallace, Wellar or Weller, Wooden or Wooding and Wouldham, names of which a number are still extant in the district. Some of these families may have had previous associations with

Ash. Thus, for example, the records of the Rochester Consistory Court include a Will made in 1533 by a John Beste of Ash who may well have been a forbear of the seventeenth century Bests. Others may have had Ash ancestors of too modest means to become testators. In general, they represent a wider cross-section of the inhabitants than do the long-standing families with a known earlier provenance. Mostly, of course, their menfolk worked on the land, whether as farmers, husbandmen or labourers, but professions and trades were not unrepresented. Those few of whom further detail is now given are within the more specialist categories. A start is made with butchers.
   The first Oliver recorded in the registers is one George, who died in 1639. There is then a gap until near the end of the century but, in between, the Hearth Tax assessment of 1664 provides an Abraham Oliver, who was rated for a four-hearth and so a sizeable house. Those two Olivers may or may not have been of the family that gave its name to Oliver’s Farm at West Yoke and who became hereditary butchers of Ash. Probably they were and an Elizabeth Oliver who died a widow