Mrs Frances Ruscombe and her maid, Mary Champness, otherwise Sweet: A double murder at College Green
On Thursday 27 September 1764, a spinster in late middle-age, Miss Jefferies, went to her sister Frances’s house on College Green where she had been invited to dine at 12 noon. It appears the...
The Miller Family Football Team, 1914
With the Euros on our collective minds I am honouring our Brislington family team, the Miller family. By 1901 the Millers arrived at 9 Grove Road with a large family and were soon blessed...
An Innocent Casualty of the Bristol Riots
The Bristol Mercury of 13 June 1846 tells of a recent event in Gloucester when on Tuesday night at nearly midnight, a girl of abandoned character nicknamed ‘Welsh Nan’ with her hair dishevelled, her...
Tracing my ancestry – How did it all begin for me?
Would any of this have happened if we hadn’t come to Brislington to live? Perhaps, perhaps not. I never had anything to do with Brislington before and although I knew vaguely that it was...
Anna Maria Falconbridge – a life that would make a good Netflix series
My previous subject (Mary Kennedy, as far as we know) wrote only one line about her voyage to the other side of the World and back. By contrast Anna Maria Falconbridge is her direct...
Mary Kennedy – Adventures on the First Fleet and Beyond
Mary Kennedy of Baptists Mills in Bristol is one of an elite group of people who made landfall at Sydney Cove in January 1788. They numbered approximately 1,373 persons, consisting of convicts, male and...
The Missing: Letters from the War, 1803-1815
A Man of War is a most miserable place,” so says 14 year-old sailor James Harding from St George, in 1810, as if we didn’t know from numerous films and TV. In the later...
Victoria Park: The Anatomy of a Dead-end Street
The Story of the street in Kingswood where I was brought up. For thirty years of my life, give or take the few when I went travelling, I lived at no. 33 Victoria Park,...
The Underground Men: A Personal View of the Kingswood Colliers
This article was written in Spring 1981 and published in Avon Past issue No 4 (the journal of the Avon Archaeological Council and the Avon Local History Association (ALHA). This article was very much...
A Miner’s Candlestick
This candlestick belonged to Robert King 1837-1918, a Kingswood coalminer who first went down the mine aged seven “in a bucket, sitting on a miner’s lap”. Because of the narrowness of the Kingswood seams,...
About Me
I have been researching the social history of the West Country for 45 years. During this time I have collated information on a wide range of people living and working in the West Country including miners, ethnic minorities, petty criminals, sailors, tommies, benefactors, brassmakers and many more. The thing that I find amazing is that ordinary people always lived extraordinary lives. I hope you like my blog that brings together my lifetime of research.
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