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PARDNA, them Earps still marshal in a big way down on the south-west frontier . .
The critters are still riding hard on the big country which
 their pioneer forefathers helped to open up three centuries ago.
More than 100 years after the famous Marshal Wyatt Earp led
them through hot lead to their high noon of fame at the Battle of the OK Corral, the family are very much alive and kicking. But today their territory is fields of brussels and beetroot rather than rolling prairies of buffalo grass.They are more likely to be at home at the wheel of a tractor than in the saddle of a bucking bronco. And instead of Colts and Winchesters they can be seen toting cultivators and wellingtons. For these are not the Earps of Tombstone, Arizona - they are the Earps of King's Newton and Melbourne, Derbyshire. who traditionally have homesteaded as farmers and market gardeners close to where our county goes south of the border down Leicestershire way.
POSSE
But the Derbvshire Earps proudly claim that Wyatt Earp was a descendant of a branch of their family who left the Melbourne area and made a new home in Scotland before emigrating to America. And now teacher David Bell and his pupils at Melbourne Junior School have formed a posse of geneaologists who are hot on the trail of the Earps and are determined to track down the facts or the fiction of this family legend.
One day nine-year-old Rachael Earp brought to school a family tree for her particular branch of the family and declared: "I am descended from Wyatt Earp."
Having already traced his own ancestry back to the eighteenth century, this was challenge enough for David Bell to launch a full scale investigation of the Earp family tree.
Now after four months and many hours of painstaking research by teacher and pupils, a detailed history of the Earps of Kings Newton and Melbourne has been assembled that reaches back to the mid 1600s. and the investigation has already produced some glimmers of evidence to support the Earp tradition that the greatest Western lawman of them all was a direct descendant of Derbyshire stock.
It is known that Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born in 1848 of Scottish descent in Monrnouth, Illinois, and that he was a sixth generation American.
David Bell says: "Various members of the Earp family left Melbourne and went to various parts of the country in the early eighteenth century. "It is likely that one of these Earps could have been the man of the Earp legend who went to Scotland before emigrating to America and whose descendant was Wyatt Earp.
Over the last 300 years the Earp family tree has become splintered into 11complex branches which still identified by the nicknames of the original patriachs who found the sub-lines
They are the Winkie Earps, the Bod Earps, the Sparrow Earps, the Caw Earps, the Tippy Earps, the Bingie Earps, the Nutty Earps, the Clutch Earps, the Knowledge Earps, the Tilkin Earps and the Nockie Earps.
He has gleaned Earp names, Earp births and Earp deaths from gravestones in Melbourne graveyard and cemetery, from parish records, nonconformist records, the public records office in London, old wills at the joint record office in Lichfield, Derbyshire County Archives, Derby local studies library, Melbourne Civic Society and the Mormon micro-fiche census records.
But David has been greatly aided by his pupils bringing in old family documents and photographs and even "seedling" family trees." At Melbourne Junior and Infant School today there are seven Earp children, but a further 20 pupils have proven connections with the family" he says,
A paper chart stretching about six yards round a classroom wall traces the ancestry of the current Earp and Earp-related children at the school.
David adds: "It has become a challenge for pupils to see if they are related to the Earps. The investigation has involved parents and grandparents and has excited interest in large areas of the community. We have had a lot of feedback and co-operation."
Apart from the possibility of a glamorous American connection, the school's researchers have revealed the Earp's as a leading family in the Melbourne area for more than three centuries.
It is believed the first Earps were two Parliamentarian military officers who arrived in Melbourne in or just after the English Civil War.
Until two generations ago, the family had always been essentially farmers and market gardeners, but the Winkie Earps founded Melbourne's first bank and prospered as financiers. And Thomas Earp, a brewer became MP for Newark in 1875.
David Bell admits to becoming hooked on the hunt for the Earp's and has forecast that it will take another two years work before the family tree is completed.
"The search is still on" says David " The next stage will be to tie up all the loose ends we have come across over the last 300 years
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