Little Gaddesden's turn for a makeover

Yet another village, this time Little Gaddesden, gets a major update with new photographs, new pages of material, and new internal and external links. Why not visit the new village "home" page and see the improvements.

If you are interested in a particular village or hamlet which has not yet been reformatted and updated just let me know (mentioning why you are interested) and I will put it on my "to do" list.

Do you recognise this Edmund Barber?

Paul has recently acquired a beautiful child's leather bound clasped common prayer book. Inside the front cover the name Annie M Barber. On the inside fly sheet it is inscribed "Annie M Barber from your brother Edmund, June 10th 1869" and he wants to return it to the right Barber family - if he can identify them.

There was an Edmund Barber in Tring (see Barber, Tring, 19th century) but unfortunately not the right one, and they may not have come from Hertfordshire.. If you think you can help identify this Edmund and Annie M Barber let Paul know by commenting below.

Hertfordshire and the Public Catalogue Foundation

The Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording the oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom and this can be viewed on the BBC site Your Paintings. I decided to have a look to see if there were many that could be relevant to this web site and a search for "Tring" produced a number such as this one of the Tring Market House, which is held by the Dacorum Heritage Trust on loan from the Tring & District Local History Society. A search for "Hemel Hempstead" showed three pictures held by the Dacorum Heritage Trust - The Six Bells Pub, Bury Road (which had been given by Stephen Hearn, of Tring Market Auctions), Hemel Hempstead Market, showing members of the Cranstone Family (purchases with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund), and Highfield Farm, Hemel Hempstead (donated by the artist, David Neal). Searches for several smaller villages produced nothing by I found this lovely painting of Redbourn Church painted in 1901 and on display in the Wardown Park Museum, Luton.

While this new site does not many  Hertfordshire paintings why not add a comment here if you find one relevant to your family history!

I'm feeling a bit cut up ...

Yesterday I went under the knife at High Wycombe Hospital as a day patient. Everything seems to have gone as planned so far - except that having asked me to come in at 7.30 am for the morning list (having not eaten in the previous 12 hours) they then transferred me to a different consultant's list in the afternoon so I was left sitting around in the hospital for seven hours unable to eat anything! After the operation I was given instructions as to what to do while recovering, first from the general anesthetic, then concerning the removal of the stitches, and finally over the next six weeks.

"She who must be obeyed" attended the debriefing and added some additional rules about being generally careful and taking things easy. This directly affects some aspects of this web site and lifting heavy weights is officially out, which I am sure will be interpreted as not lifting some of heaviest items off my library shelves, or rummaging through boxes of books and papers. (Believe it or not, the first query I got on returning from hospital will require looking things up in a vast pile of old computer listings stored in the garage before I can provide a full answer.) However other aspects of living will take longer and I am expected to spend more time "putting my feet up."

Last month I warned you that I might be a bit slow in seeing your email in my inbox for a couple of days .... and in fact succeeded in posting more than one new post a day! This time I am taking the matter more seriously so if there are gaps in the delay postings or delays in responding to emails during October don't be surprised. 

A Buntingford Butcher sells cheap meat ...

On 22nd December, 1907 Arthur Jackson, a family butcher of Church Street, Buntingford, supplied Mr. Smith with the following items.

1 lb 11 oz      Pork      1s 1d

 1lb 8 oz    Sausages    1s

6 lb 11 oz   leg mutton   5s 7d

Total    7s 8d

The mutton works out (in modern measurements and currency) at about 10p a kilo

In fact Arthur was just one of three brothers who were butchers in Buntingford - the sons of Henry Jackson, who was the landlord of the Sword in Hand, Westmill. For more information see JACKSON, Butchers, Buntingford

Pictures and basic information on Wendover, Buckinghamshire

The Old Cottages, Wendover

The parish of Tring is surrounded on three sides by Buckinghamshire, and in order to understand its history it is useful to look at the surrounding parishes, and the history of transport in the area - including the canal. One arm of the canal goes to Wendover and as a result I have created a single page including a description of this small town in 1918, some hundred year old post card images (high resolution images available), and links to modern photographic images.

The London-Birmingham Railway in 1862

Building the Railway Embankment at Boxmoor in 1837

I have updated the menu on the draft Railway page to provide a link to the previously hard to find page which contains pictures of construction work in 1837. I have also added a reproduction of the relevant Black's Guide description of the line in 1862.

Ups and Downs in September

Overall things have been going well in September and I exceeded the target of  an average of one new post a day. . The number of views of this newsletter blog have increased, making up for the dip over the summer (and during the Olympic games). The total number of views to date has gone through the 40,000 mark and hopefully will have reached 5000 views a month by the end of the year. The main web site had 20,000 visitors in September, viewing 64,000 pages and is well on target to exceed 250,000 visitors in 2012.

During the month I have also upgraded an number of small village pages [Ardeley, Barkway, Flamstead, Furneaux Pelham & the Wymondleys, Halton, Leverstock Green] and well as answering a number of queries including Kingston BEDFORD, bone setter & farrier of Hemel Hempstead, and Did your ancestor go to a private boarding school. In view of the news this morning it is interesting that earlier this month I posted information on the figure on the top of the Ryder Cup. I was also delighted to find the wonderful descriptions of old Hertford published by Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection. Having "bounced" my camera at Flog It at the end of August, I acquired a Canon SX40 HS as a replacement and am very pleased with the results (see my 1st and 2nd impressions) and have already posted a number of the new photographs on the Flamstead page.

High resolution modern photographs of Flamstead

As part of my assessment of my new Canon Powershot SX40 HS Camera I took a number of photographs of St Leonard's Church, Flamstead, and the nearby village. These have now been uploaded onto the Geograph web site (with higher resolution options) and linking thumb pictures have been posted on the Flamstead home page, and also on the St Leonard's Church page.

Some Modern Views of Flamstead
] Almshouses	Spotted Dog	Three Blackbirds	Village Hall

Chris Watts, Genealogist

I have just learnt of the death of Chris Watts at the beginning of August, and I suspect that many of you will have meet him, or read one of the book he wrote jointly with his brother. He was for a time the chair of the Society of Genealogists and worked at the Nation Archives at Kew - both as an employee and more recently as a volunteer with their Friends organisation. He also gave talks on genealogy subjects, both in England and overseas.

I last met him almost exactly two years ago, when he was giving a lecture on the High Court of Justice records at Kew. We first met when we worked together on a major military computer system called Linesman over 40 years ago, in the middle of the Cold War and while there are a number of obituaries relating to his genealogical work I feel a story on a different aspect of his life is appropriate.

The Linesman hardware was already archaic when we were working on it and the computer complex was huge by present day standards. When a parliamentary question asked how big the computer was the answer was "Half an acre" (= 2000 sq.m.). The computer room had originally been built to hold 32 computers each of which consisted of 18 cabinets - and the effective processing power was probably not much more that the 1980s BBC computer (an early personal computer designed for school use). 

We were both working for Plessey and for a time there were six of us working together as a systems design team in an office at Stoke Poges. Someone had put a note on the door "Chemistry Department - Ph.Ds must be shown" Both Chris and I had Ph.D.s in chemistry and everyone one else either had a chemistry degree or a Ph.D. (If this seems strange, the British Universities had been turning out more chemistry graduates than were needed to do chemistry related research and development - but industry was crying out for managers with a good science background, particularly in the rapidly expanding computer industry.)

Many aspects of the Linesman project were deemed to be "Top Secret" and Chris found it frustrating trying to design a system when key aspects were so hush hush that the systems designers were not allowed to know them. One morning he came in with a great big smile on his face, and told us he was about to phone one of his RAF contacts to ask a "forbidden" question - which was how many Russian bombers were flying over the North Sea on a typical day. When his contact refused to give an answer Chris then asked "Can I use the number given in the Panorama programme which was broadcast on the BBC last night?" - Later that day his contact phoned back and sheepishly said "Yes".

If you have any memories of Chris why not add them as a comment here.