Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Who Do You Think You Are?

To anyone new to family history, those first steps can seem quite bewildering. There are a lot of options out there, but this month we are focusing on the ten key resources that every family historian needs to master. These are the genealogical tools that Laura turns to again and again when researching a celebrity’s family for Who Do You Think You Are? and we could all benefit from using them better. Although we couldn’t do our research without the essential records, we are also shining a light on some more unusual gems including patient records from Great Ormond Street Hospital (page 48) and servants’ wages books (page 63). We’ve also got some useful advice on dating studio portraits (page 55) and using the National Library of Scotland’s free digitised…

While the PDF trial only goes part of the way, it’s a step in the right direction GRO releases birth and death records as PDFs The pilot scheme provides a cheaper and quicker alternative for family historians Family historians can now order PDFs of birth and death records via a new pilot scheme from The General Register Office (GRO). For a three-month period, starting from 12 October 2017, 1837–1916 birth records and 1837–1957 death records will be available by email for £6 each from the webpage www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/ default.asp. The GRO, which holds all English and Welsh birth, marriage and death records dating back to 1837, said that it would use the scheme to “assess the demand for this service over a prolonged period”. The GRO previously conducted a three-phase PDF pilot…

‘Six battle-scarred tanks, veterans of the Western Front, toured the nation’ Tanks for the money Alan Crosby uncovers a remarkable fundraising campaign that took place exactly 100 years ago A passing reference can open a window on something in history you knew little about. I was doing some research on William Birtwistle, a self-made multimillionaire cotton magnate from Blackburn who died in 1936. He was a formidable character, but his obituary in the Blackburn Times emphasised that he used his great wealth wisely, leading a frugal and modest lifestyle but helping many good causes. Among those singled out was the visit of the tank ‘Egbert’ to Preston and Blackburn in 1918, part of the Tank Banks fundraising campaign. I dimly remembered reading about this, but had forgotten all of the…

8 SEPTEMBER 1943 Italy surrenders. The Italians effectively come over to the side of the Allies. Thousands of officers and soldiers are shot as traitors at Hitler’s command. 13 SEPTEMBER 1943 Captain George Jellicoe (right), Special Boat Squadron Leader, lands on Leros as one of the first members of the SBS to arrive on the island. 20 SEPTEMBER 1943 The Royal Irish Fusiliers land on Leros, after being dispatched from Haifa, Palestine, on two destroyers. No one knew where they were going as they boarded. 3 OCTOBER 1943 At 4.30am the invasion of Kos begins. By 6am the following day 1,388 British and 3,145 Italians are taken prisoner and Kos falls, with the loss of the only Allied airfield in the vicinity. 12 NOVEMBER 1943 German landing craft arrive simultaneously…

ARCHIVES • Imperial War Museums (IWM) Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ iwm.org.uk The IWM holds private papers of Second World War soldiers, a large collection of photographs and a sound archive containing recollections of soldiers. You can search their online catalogue or vist IWM London. • National Army Museum Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HT nam.ac.uk The museum holds some images and documents from those who served. They can also help pinpoint diaries or information of a person within a particular regiment. WEBSITES • Commonwealth War Graves Commission  www.cwgc.org The commission has information on Commonwealth dead for both world wars, frequently including next of kin, and the grace plots and memorials it looks after. A search on ‘Leros’ shows the men buried on the island. • Military Service Records…

LOCAL ARCHIVES Here you can find gems about the life and times of the people who lived in a particular place. There may be occupational records specific to that area, while local archives also hold workhouse records and newspapers, and many have collections of historical photographs. To find an archive, go to discovery.national archives.gov.uk/find-an-archive. Do check the archive’s own website before visiting, to see what its holdings include. ROYAL COMMISSIONS Enquiries were held into matters of national importance, such as – in Simon’s story – mining conditions. They are useful to the family historian in that they can shed light on our ancestors’ experiences of certain aspects of life, such as the workplace, and often include individual testimonies. To track down Royal Commissions, try searching the Discovery Catalogue at discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. SOCIAL…

Billingtons of Hanley bit.ly/2y4pIx7 I am trying to confirm that Richard Billington (born 1768) was born in Hanley or thereabouts before moving to open a china shop in Dumfries. His first child, Sarah, was born in Hanley in 1813 but the other children were born in Dumfries. I’m also trying to find the maiden name of Richard’s wife Mary, and the names of his parents. Tobina Marriage of Jabez Wood bit.ly/2gI90MI I am trying to find a record of Jabez Wood’s first marriage. He was born in Finedon, Northamptonshire, in 1839, and joined the army in 1857. He served for 21 years (ten in India). He was discharged in Chichester in 1878, where he married my great great grandmother Alice Mills. The marriage certificate says that Jabez was a widower…

“Though apparently not recently updated (for example, it makes no mention of service records being available at Findmypast), airhistory.org.uk contains a wealth of detail on the RFC along with some records relating to the RNAS and RAF. As well as basic information on the history and organisation of the RFC, the site has numerous searchable spreadsheets containing thousands of names of officers and other ranks (the ground crew who serviced the aircraft and did the work) derived from a wealth of documents held at TNA and the RAF Museum. Full names and dates of birth are included where known, along with the squadron served with, the date of any incident recorded and full details of the source. This can be invaluable because the AIR 1 series at TNA, from which…

BOOKS • Tracing Your Ancestors Through Family Photographs by Jayne Shrimpton (Pen & Sword, 2014) Detailed guide to dating and interpreting studio portraits and other family photos. • The Victorians: Photographic Portraits by Audrey Linkman (Tauris Parke, 1993) Scholarly explanation of early photography and studio portraits; highly illustrated. WEBSITES • The Cabinet Card Gallery  cabinetcardgallery.wordpress.com Interesting website featuring international cabinet portraits and other studio formats, but the estimated dates are often inaccurate. • Photographers of Great Britain & Ireland, 1840–1940  cartedevisite.co.uk Good website for learning about studio photographers and their clients, with free articles to download, photographer biographies and A–Z lists of studios. • Portrait Photography from the Victorians to the Present Day  bit.ly/npg-por Aimed at teachers, this downloadable guide from the National Portrait Gallery provides a clear overview of…

Hamleys’ flagship store in Regent Street is claimed to be the oldest and the biggest toy shop in the world. It stocks 50,000 lines of toys over seven floors, and welcomes over five million visitors every year. The company is named after its 18th-century founder, William Hamley from Bodmin, Cornwall. He eschewed the more predictable occupations, such as fisherman or miner, and dreamed of opening a toy shop, which he did in 1760 in Holborn, London. It was called Noah’s Ark and was visited by the wealthy residents of the nearby squares who bought tin soldiers, dolls, hoops and wooden horses. By 1837 the shop had passed to his grandsons and Queen Victoria became a patron. They opened a new store in Regent Street in 1881, where Hamleys still stands.…

For centuries elegant gloves have completed a refined outfit, as demonstrated by the Queen throughout her adult life. Many of the short gloves worn by Her Majesty for daytime engagements and long gloves for evening and state functions are produced by the company Cornelia James (corneliajames.com). This family business is currently run by Genevieve Lawson, the daughter of its founder Cornelia James (1917–1999), a fashion design graduate from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts who arrived in Britain in 1939 as an Austrian Jewish refugee. Surviving the war years by making and selling gloves, by 1946 Cornelia was firmly established as a skilled London glove-maker and attracted the attention of Norman Hartnell, the royal couturier. Through this connection she was invited to make a pair of white cotton ‘going away’…

CIVIL DEATH RECORDS Certificates of deaths in England and Wales dating back to 1837 can be ordered at www.gro.gov.uk, costing £9.25 each. However, the General Register Office is currently trialling a new system in which uncertified PDF versions of the records can be purchased at a cost of £6 each (see On the Record, page 10 ). Civil records of deaths in Scotland dating back to 1855 can be found on the pay-per-view service scotlandspeople.gov.uk, while Irish death records dating back to 1864 can be accessed at irishgenealogy.ie (free) and nidirect.gov.uk. LOCAL NEWSPAPERS If your ancestor’s death certificate states that an inquest was held, you may find a report in a local newspaper – just like Tim. Since he undertook his original research, over 22 million pages of historic newspapers…

871 The first Battle of Reading sees an invasion force of Danes taken on by an army that is led by a pair of brothers: King Aethelred and Alfred the Great. 1214 King John is besieged at Windsor Castle during the revolt of the English barons. From here he will begin negotiations that will lead to the signing of the Magna Carta. 1440 Eton College is founded by Henry VI as ‘The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor’. 1700 Jethro Tull’s horse-drawn seed drill helps spark the British Agricultural Revolution. Tull dies in 1741 at Prosperous Farm, Hungerford. 1785 The Simonds brewery is founded in Reading by William Blackall Simonds. Following various mergers and takeovers, the Reading brewery finally closes in 2010. 1791 The Oatlands Stakes is…

Family Tree Maker 2017 by Software MacKiev, for Mac and Windows DVD full version £89.95; DVD upgrade version £49.95; USB upgrade version £53.95 For first-time buyers, Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2017 is an effective and powerful offering enabling the creation of family trees, reports and charts on your home computer, and features the ability to synchronise data with a tree hosted online. The user interface is surprisingly unchanged from FTM 2014, although some new functions have been added while others have been enhanced. As well as through ancestry.co.uk, it is now possible to perform searches of online-hosted trees through familysearch.org, and to incorporate findings if desired. The media area’s new and limited ‘Photo Darkroom’ facility enables basic enhancements to images for incorporation into trees, while a potentially more useful ‘Colour…

Australian newspapers Craig Revel Horwood has roots Down Under. We were able to piece together the rags-to-riches tale of his 3x great grandfather Charles Tinworth thanks to the vast collection of newspapers available via the National Library of Australia’s Trove service. 1 Navigate to trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper to begin your search; the website is available to use completely free of charge. Enter the name of your ancestor in the appropriate box and click the ‘Search’ button. Use quotation marks to ensure that the ancestor’s full name is searched for – eg “Charles Tinworth”. 2 All matching results will appear, with a brief summary of each article displayed. Click on any article that piques your interest. 3 The next page will display a full scan of the article, and you can use the…

FamilySearch starts South Australian immigrant collection More than 200,000 records of those who emigrated to South Australia have been made available at free family history website familysearch.org. The digital offering of ship papers, dating from 1849 to 1940, contains records of the names and ages of 201,371 immigrants, many of whom were British or Irish, and the ships they sailed on, along with 6,127 images of the documents. The 1849–1867 and 1873–1885 papers also contain records of births and deaths aboard. Transcriptions of some of the documents are also available as part of a project at theshipslist.com/ships/australia/ SAassistedindex.shtml. Imperial War Museums to commemorate the end of First World War Imperial War Museums (IWM) has announced that it will mark the centenary of the end of the First World War next year…

When you start researching any family tree, the fundamental first step is to work with what you already know, drawing out your first family tree with as many names, dates and places as you can muster, then turning to other living relatives for their input. But then what? The big commercial genealogy websites like ancestry.co.uk, findmypast.co.uk, thegenealogist.co.uk and myheritage.com have digitised so many records now that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by choice, so here we look at the key documents that will help you grow a tree with solid roots, and the coverage that each record has online. The likelihood of finding your ancestors in most of the records described here is pretty high, simply because of the sheer number of names that they contain. In the majority of…

Work out in advance what information you want from the interviewee. Be punctual, courteous and friendly. Explain to them how the interview will work, and the topics you want to discuss. Have a list of questions ready. Use them as a prompt if your interviewee dries up, or just to make sure that you get all of the information you wanted. Take notes during the interview, but also record the conversation using a tape recorder or a smartphone app so that you can transcribe it verbatim. Give the interviewee a fairly free rein. Try not to interrupt so you get as much information as you can. Leave the interview open-ended so that they have time to talk. Don’t rush them to a deadline. Because of their training, former soldiers are…

Two tips for tracing foreign ancestry are be imaginative with spellings and exhaust all UK records first Q I’m trying to learn more about my Italian great grandmother, Sobbella Volante. According to member trees on ancestry.co.uk, she was born about 1869 in Atina, Italy, and died in 1901 in Cornwall. According to the 1901 census, Sobbella was married to Arduino Volante and had two children: Joseph (my grandfather) and Bessie Palmer Volante. By 1902 Arduino was married to a Maria Benedetta Di Manno, who is on the 1911 census as his wife. If the Ancestry trees are to be believed, Maria seems to have remarried some years later and gone to live in America. I cannot find anything about Sobbella: no birth, marriage or death record or maiden name. Geraldene…

‘She was a ‘Voluntary Mute’ who refused to speak or open her eyes for long periods’ There was no specialist hospital for children in England in the early Victorian period. Dr Charles West (1816–1898), an expert in diseases of women and children, was determined to change this after training in France and Germany, where such hospitals were common. In 1850 a committee was duly formed, with support from eminent philanthropists and public-health reformers such as Lord Shaftesbury, Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Edwin Chadwick of the Board of Health. In February 1852 the Hospital for Sick Children opened at No. 49 Great Ormond Street with just 20 beds. The number of patients grew rapidly and the hospital moved to a new site in 1875. Great Ormond Street Hospital continues to treat children…

Ancestry has a number of important resources for researching airmen, not least because records of an RFC airman who died or was discharged before the foundation of the RAF would be with the British Army personnel records (ancestry.co.uk/cs/ world-war-1), and you might find references within medal rolls or pension records. The site also has Aviators’ Certificates, issued by the Royal Aero Club to individuals who qualified as pilots between 1910 and 1950 – often with an accompanying photo. A collection of these can also be found at forces-war-records.co.uk, and you can read more about how they were issued via the ‘Pathway to Pilot’ pages of rafmuseum.org.uk located at bit.ly/rafpathway. The popular Great War forum (1914-1918.invisionzone.com) is, as always, a valuable place to post or read queries – at the time of…

Servant’s signature Elizabeth Bacon’s receipt for her wages of £2 13s 4d for four months’ work. Start date Elizabeth started work as a housemaid on 11 October 1834 at £8 a year. Monthly salary Elizabeth’s signed receipt for her wages. Job description Christian Dickens arrived as a weekly servant to undertake housemaid’s work at 10s 6d per week board wages. This is followed by a list of payments made to Christian in 1835. Misbehaviour and dismissal A note stating that Elizabeth and Ann Algar were dismissed on suspicion of leaving the tea chest unlocked each night for some weeks. It was presumed “both were implicated as they drank tea together”. The writer added that Elizabeth displayed considerable insolence (Ann behaved well), and her mother lived in Houghton. Falsely accused? Note…

BOOKS • A History of Toys by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966) An illuminating discussion of toys throughout the ages until the 1960s. • The History of Toys: From Spinning Tops to Robots by Deborah Jaffe (Sutton Publishing, 2006) How changes in technology and attitudes have affected the development of toys. • The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture by Dennis Denisoff (ed.) (Routledge, 2008) An exploration of such topics as toys and the middle-class childhood. • Practical Education by ME Edgeworth and RL Edgeworth (Joseph Johnson, 1798) The first edition of Maria Edgeworth’s book is freely available online at archive.org/details/practicaleducati00edge. WEBSITE • Toy History and Old Toys  www.woodentoys-shop.com/ toy-history-toys-games.php3 An interesting article outlining a brief history of toys. MUSEUMS • Brighton Toy and Model Museum 52–55 Trafalgar Street, Brighton BN1…

• The A–Z of Yeovil’s History  yeovilhistory.info/gloving-intro.htm The ‘Leather and Gloving in Yeovil’ page outlines the history of the local industry between the 14th and 20th centuries. • Bradford on Avon Museum Wiltshire bradfordonavonmuseum.co.uk/tanning This website features details and photographs of the J&T Beaven leather and glove company, which was founded in Holt c1770. • Dents Museum Warminster, Wiltshire dents.co.uk/general/ museum This manufacturer of gloves since 1777 maintains a vast collection viewable by appointment. • Somerset Voices  somersetvoices.org.uk/people/?q=Glove-making This website of oral history features audio recordings with transcriptions containing the memories of two local glovers from the early to mid-1900s. • The Worshipful Company of Glovers  thegloverscompany.org This is the key website for London glovers, the history of the guild and the glove industry in general.…

The BRO website berkshirerecordoffice.org.uk is dated, but has lots of interesting content. There’s an online catalogue, galleries, documents of the month, and PDF copies of the archive newsletter The Berkshire Echo. County archivist Mark Stevens says: “The service website is due to be redesigned during late 2017 and we’re hoping to make it more mobile-friendly, while keeping all the content from our monthly highlights and exhibition galleries.” FamilySearch (familysearch.org/wiki/en/ Berkshire,_England_Online_Genealogy_ Records) lists key online sources for Berkshire (free and subscription-based) – the highlights include Findmypast’s images of school admission registers from the mid-19th century to about 1914. There are also hundreds of thousands of names to search in the aforementioned Berkshire FHS parish transcripts. Meanwhile the BRO has signed a contract with Ancestry to digitise Berkshire electoral registers from 1839 to 1965,…

Why doesn’t the code that’s printed in the magazine work correctly? Each bonus content code applies only to the issue of the magazine in which it’s printed. Make sure that you’ve clicked on the red ‘View content’ button next to the cover of the correct issue. Why isn’t the code box appearing? If nothing happens when you click the red ‘View content’ button, it’s possible that firewall or virus-checking software is stopping the website from running JavaScript. You can check to see if this is the case by temporarily halting these programs and then reloading the website. Why is the data only available for a period of six months? Due to terms and conditions agreed with the firms that provide bonus content for our magazine, data is only available for…

Working on the Victorian Railway: Life in the Early Days of Steam by Anthony Dawson Amberley, 96 pages, £14.99 The railways revolutionised British life in the Victorian era. Though slim, this book is filled with fascinating details about the industry, and the text is accompanied throughout by a mixture of colour and black-and-white illustrations, including photos and diagrams. Working on the Victorian Railway is divided into six chapters: ‘Enginemen and Firemen’; ‘Driving and Firing’; ‘Signals and Safety’; ‘Policemen and Guards’; ‘End of the Line’, which focuses on the preparation for and arrival at stations; and a final chapter looking at the safety elements of early Victorian railways. At the end there is a bibliography of the rules and regulations of the railway lines and the train companies themselves. If you…

40,394 baptism records added to the East End and Docklands collection at findmypast.co.uk 5 year project to create a single global family tree announced by Living DNA 2,690 poorhouse records from Kirkcaldy, Fife, now available at ancestry.co.uk 3 new 19th-century Worldwide Army Lists added to the genealogist.co.uk, listing over 600,000 British soldiers in 1851, 1861 and 1871 1,674 years after the death of St Nicholas, archaeologists think they’ve found his tomb in Antalya, Turkey 11,001 Warwickshire parish records added to the collection at familysearch.org…

As the bullets whizzed past his ear, 21-year-old Lieutenant Edward ‘Ted’ Johnson remained quite still behind a large boulder. He was halfway up Mount Appetici, his sergeant lying next to him killed by a single shot through the head. Half of his men were below him, half above, and the Germans were all around them. As Ted crouched in the rubble of rocks and pebbles, prickly gorse scratched his feet. The smell of sulphate filled the air after days of bombing. Constant battle had made sleep impossible, and the only thing keeping him alert was the adrenalin pumping through his body, urged on by the amphetamine drugs given by the Army to keep officers awake. Ted’s story is only one of the tales I heard first-hand from interviewing survivors of…

Tracking down the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Leros was a very organic process. I first spoke to people on the ground and civilians interested in the war who knew some of the veterans who had been back to the island. I then researched which regiments were involved in the fighting, and looked for names and places online. I also searched for books and manuscripts in the archive collections of libraries, looking for everything connected to the word ‘Leros’. Some of the soldiers had published books privately, but I was able to get in touch and ask them for interviews. I also contacted the staff of regimental museums, some of whom offered personal accounts, diaries, maps and log books from their archives, and put me in touch with…

‘My ancestors didn’t stick their heads above the parapet. They weren’t in the papers’ “During the afternoon of Wednesday 4 July 1838, a dreadful storm raged over Southern Yorkshire. Rain hammered down in Silkstone and water began to pour into Moorend Colliery. In the 100-yard-deep mine the levels were rising quickly. When the pumping engine failed, the engine tenter, John Hinchliffe, told the banksman to call the miners out of the pit. Forty frightened children who were working in the connected Huskar pit began to make their way to escape through a ventilation hole that came out in Knabbs Wood. As the youngsters approached their exit point, a stream overflowed and poured into the pit. As the torrent rushed in, 14 children managed to slip into a side passage, but…

MARK DALY is a former lawyer and professional translator with over 20 years’ experience in researching family history CAROL KERRY-GREEN is a member of AGRA and specialises in Yorkshire research MARGARET McGREGOR is a member of both AGRA and the Archives and Records Association SYLVIA MURPHY is based in Australia and has been researching families in Colonial India since 1996. JAYNE SHRIMPTON is a professional dress historian and portrait specialist DALE SULLIVAN is a member of AGRA based in Derbyshire STEPHEN THOMAS is a genealogist with more than 20 years of experience and regularly appears on TV as an expert PHIL TOMASELLI is a military family history expert and the author of Tracing Your Air Force Ancestors IAN WALLER is a former chairman of AGRA…

British-born actor and director Noel Clarke grew up in West London to parents from Trinidad. During his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? he flew to the Caribbean to learn more about their ancestry, ultimately discovering that his 4x great grandfather, Glasgow Bedeau, had been a slave on the small island of Carriacou, Grenada. Although evidence of slavery in his family tree was not a surprise to Noel, he was nevertheless upset. We were able to research Glasgow’s life using a variety of records, some of which are available online. For example, Glasgow is mentioned in the Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1813–1834 collection on ancestry.co.uk, which is searchable by name and digitised from records held at The National Archives (TNA) at Kew. TNA holds several…

Professional photographic portraits first became available to our early Victorian ancestors, and subsequent generations gradually grew accustomed to visiting commercial photographic studios. Even when home ownership of cameras and amateur snapshots became popular during the early to mid-20th century, a professional likeness was still considered superior and so most of us have formal studio portraits among our collections of family photos. The first British photographic studios opened from 1841 in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, Bath, Dublin, Edinburgh and other cities, the new ‘daguerreotype portrait rooms’ offering elegant, one-off photographic images struck onto a silvered copper plate. Fragile and irreplaceable, daguerreotypes were protected under glass and presented in a folding case. Initially costing about one guinea, they remained luxury photographs even after prices lowered to 12–14s, reserved mainly for affluent patrons.…

‘We can now discover a lot more about men who lost their lives’ The huge losses experienced by the merchant fleet as a result of enemy action are an often forgotten aspect of the First World War. Numerous fishing trawlers were sunk off British shores while carrying out patrol duties, with particular dangers attached to sweeping minefields. Grimsby men played their part in this hazardous endeavour: 5,875 joined the Royal Naval Reserve and Auxiliary Service to help the war effort. However, the Lincolnshire town was one of Britain’s premier fishing ports, and the fishing industry was so important – locally and nationally – that the trawlers had to be used for their normal tasks as well, venturing out into a North Sea scattered with minefields and infested with German vessels.…

‘Transforming skins into wearable gloves involved dozens of complex processes’ Gloves have been worn since prehistoric times, serving various purposes. While simple hand-coverings have long provided warmth and protection, by the Middle Ages the display of ornate gauntlet gloves came to symbolise royal and aristocratic power and status. From the 16th century fine gloves, scented and embellished with embroidery and fringing, were desirable fashion items, while by the 1700s various styles were worn throughout society, and during the 1800s many new designs and colours were introduced. In Britain the occupation of glove-making emerged wherever gloves were needed for everyday or ceremonial use. Medieval cities like London, York, Oxford and Worcester were important glove-making centres and early glove guilds developed to regulate the trade. London glovers were loosely organised by the…

‘William’s horse reared up, throwing him over the lower parapet’ How long have you been doing your family history? I started being interested in genealogy when I received the 1973 Look and Learn annual for my 13th birthday. Inside there was an article about creating a family tree, which really grabbed my attention. I was still very young and unable to do much research, so I just talked to my surviving grandparents and began writing things down. How much information did you manage to uncover before hitting your brick wall? As a result of speaking to my relatives, I managed to trace back to my great great grandfather William Hodgson, a farmer from a small village named Burniston, near Scarborough. My paternal grandmother (William’s granddaughter) gave me an ‘In Memoriam’…

Berkshire Burials has about 96 per cent of the burial entries in county registers Berkshire was the venue for many turning points in British history. King John took refuge in Windsor Castle during the Barons’ revolt before signing the Magna Carta, while Berkshire-born Jethro Tull created the seed drill and horse-drawn hoe, which helped spark the Agricultural Revolution. Reading was already the largest town in Berkshire before improved turnpike roads saw it become an important stopping-point on coach routes to Oxford and the West. It was known for brewing, agricultural products and cheese, and the 1810 opening of the Kennet and Avon Canal connected Reading with trade through the Bristol Channel, while the Great Western Railway arrived in 1840. The county archive looks after registers from Berkshire’s ancient parishes, alongside…

Norfolk in the Great War from Old Photographs  by Neil R Storey Amberley, 128 pages, £14.99 This collection of photographs of Norfolk during the First World War includes many unusual and poignant images, such as convalescent soldiers recovering at Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, and the commemoration for Swardestonborn nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed by the Germans. Bristol’s Pauper Children by Shirley Hodgson Bristol Books, 256 pages, £12 Shirley Hodgson provides a thorough history of Bristol’s pauper children, from efforts to look after them in workhouses, ragged schools and reformatory schools, to the stories of those sent to Canada as part of a child-migration scheme, including an index of those she has identified through her research. Brave Lives: The Members and Staff of the Travellers Club Who Fell in the…