The Great Gloucestershire Heritage Hub review of the Year 2018

Not quite Sports Personality perhaps, but there’s been so much happening and so many achievements this year, that it’s worth a quick look back now before we move too far into 2019.

Due to problems with our contractors, our building work isn’t quite complete, but our shiny new public area is, by universal agreement, a huge improvement on what went before.  It was good to leave behind our temporary research rooms at the end of March and to introduce improved opening hours including the first Saturday of each month. We’re particularly pleased to co-locate with our friends from Gloucestershire Family History Society, so the Heritage Hub really does feel like a partnership space now.

Howlers from the archives – or, the Gloucestershire Archives Christmas Quiz!

In my post yesterday I promised you two treasures from the Hicks Beach family archive. Ellice’s Victorian Christmas cards were the first, but for the second I want to take you nearly a century further back in time to the 1820s, where we meet Ellice’s great-aunt Jane Martha Hicks Beach and her book of riddles.

Jane Martha was the youngest sister of Ellice’s grandfather William, and after William’s wife (also called Jane) died, she helped him bring up his children. Jane was the family’s maiden aunt until she was 47 when she married a man called Edward St John, and she was known as “Aunt Jane” to at least two generations of the family. Ellice will have known her, as she didn’t die until he was seven years old.

Jane was a talented artist and was interested in botany and photography; the collection also includes some of her sketchbooks and photographs. She also seems to have had a fairly keen sense of humour, as the riddles in her book will show you. Many of them don’t make sense to modern eyes, some of them rely on early 19^th century cultural knowledge, and some of them are a bit of a stretch, to say the least, but some of them still make sense (and are groan-inducingly funny) today. We have been posting some of them on our social media this last week, with their answers, but to entertain you over Christmas week, I thought I’d put together a few without their answers for you to puzzle over. Answers will follow in the New Year!

Christmas and New Year cards from the archives

This gallery contains 28 photos.

One of my favourite collections of all those I’ve catalogued over the years is the archive of the Hicks Beach family of Williamstrip in Coln St Aldwyn, Netheravon in Wiltshire, and Oakley in Hampshire. It is full of all sorts … Continue reading →

New family history resources from Gloucester cemetery, Tredworth Road

Between 1976 and 1987 Gloucester City Council decided to remove a large number of headstones from the chapel side of the old cemetery in Tredworth Road. This was to make maintenance of the grounds easier with machinery.

Advertisements were placed in The Gloucester Citizen asking if relatives objected and headstones marking graves of those who lost their lives in the two World Wars were exempt from the process.

Once this consultation process was complete the inscriptions from headstones identified for removal were recorded in registers prior to their removal. In instances where surviving relatives objected, the headstones were left in place.

Gloucester Cemetery

Gloucestershire Family History Society were given permission recently to photograph all of the entries in the registers, some 2,500 photographs, and then to transcribe those entries into a more accessible format.

Volunteers from GFHS have now completed this task and have constructed a searchable database which shows the transcription on the removed headstone together with details of others buried in the same plot. This project has preserved information which no longer exists by a visit to a burial plot.

You can access this searchable database at The Family History Centre in The Heritage Hub.

National recognition of some hard work behind the scenes…

As part of our work on the County Council’s archive, my colleague Helen and I have spent the last couple of years cataloguing social care and education records relating to the safeguarding of children. We are delighted to report that our work has been featured in the National Archives’ latest annual review – here is what it says:

Scarcity of news + 1720’s= Poems! Extracts from…

Image from the Journal showing church towers from left to right: St. Mary de Lode, Cathedral, St. John’s, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Mary de Grace and St. Mary de Crypt, 13 April 1724, page 631

I came across an interesting fact whilst reading 1,339 facts to make your jaw drop, published in 2013: ‘In the 1720s, the Gloucester Journal apologised for ‘present scarcity of news’ and offered its readers a selection of poems instead.’