In early British legal documents, the year is often given as the number of years of the king or queen’s reign, rather than the year AD (Anno Domini). It was counted from the monarch’s accession, not their coronation. Another complication is that until 1752 the English legal year started on […]
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We were looking around the old graveyard at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset on a wet Sunday afternoon recently, when we came across this gravestone. The inscription is: In remembrance of Frank, dearly loved child of Joseph and Sarah Lockyer, born October 29th 1870. Died suddenly, the result of an […]
The River Avon at the West End of Ringwood. The Market Place is beyond the houses, to the right of the church. The corn mill was behind and to the left of the church. We often come across historic reports of drowning during our research. This case attracted our interest […]
The stream through our village is a winter bourne, i.e. a chalk stream that dries up if the water table falls in summer. After the hot summer of 2022 it remained dry well into the winter. But it’s running fast now and overflowing on to the road in places. Some […]
The 4,364 ton steamship ‘Royal Crown’ was launched in Newcastle in 1927. She was a freighter, operated by Hall Brothers of Newcastle. On 30th January 1940 she was attacked by a German bomber in the North Sea, about 20 miles off Great Yarmouth. The Germans dropped three bombs but missed, […]
We recently researched the names on the war memorial in St Katharine’s Church, Southbourne, Hampshire. The research is summarised in the attached document. Please contact us with any corrections or additional information.
Over the weekend 4-5th June 2022 every village, town and city in the UK celebrated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. There was an informal street party in our village and a larger event at the local town, which ended with lighting a beacon. Signal beacons were used to send alarms in […]
Our new version of the website for the Sawley & District Historical Society is now live. We’ve already added a lot of content, including some original research, but the priority was to build a structure that allows content to be easily added, without making it unwieldy or difficult to navigate. […]
Spring has sprung in England and it’s time to get the MG back on the road. The ‘C’ on the registration (licence) plate shows that it was first registered in 1965 (from Aug 1967 UK vehicle registrations ran from August to August, to even out the peaks in new car […]
Only a week to wait for the release of the 1921 Census of Great Britain. No census was taken in Ireland in 1921 because of the ongoing war of independence. The census was (and is) carried out every 10 years and released 100 years later. But the 1941 census was […]