Hope you all had a lovely Christmas. Here's to 2016....
Parish register transcriptions
Bradfield Baptisms 1738-1812, burials 1738-1780 and marriages 1754-1837 now transcribed. More to follows.
More parishes on the way.
Blog
I've written three guest blog posts for genealogy website Find My Past. First of all, there's the mysterious relatives I tracked down using the 1939 Register, and in part two, my follow-up blog in which I discovered I had a relative who travelled to Nigeria during WW2 to buy cocoa for Cadbury's. Then there's my festive blog post, Arsenic at Christmas: a recipe for disaster. Yes, it's true, the Victorians even put arsenic in Christmas cake.
When I visited my Dad at Christmas, he dug out a letter which was written by my gt-gt-grandmother on Armistice Day, 1918. It's an intriguing insight into the life of an ordinary Brightlingsea woman at the end of The Great War: Spanish Flu, sad hearts and the price of tea. I've scanned it for you but have also transcribed it, and I've filled you in on who the people are that she mentions - as well as some comments on Sarah's idiosyncratic approach to writing (there's not one full-stop in the entire letter!).
Although it's not technically an update for Essex & Suffolk Surnames, you might be interested in the interview I did with East Anglian-based author Verity Holloway, about her novella Beauty Secrets of the Martyrs. This is over on my writing website.
News
Well, last time I said I had some news, but I couldn't spill it yet. I can now! I've been commissioned to write a second book for Pen & Sword. Poison Panic will be out in June this year (hurrah!) but another book, Fatal Evidence, will be out in 2017. It's about Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor, 19th century toxicologist and forensic scientist. He turned up while I wrote Poison Panic, and I was surprised that no one had written a book about him before. Fatal Evidence looks at his life, as well as the cases he was involved in. There's famous criminals such as William Palmer, and the mysterious and unsolved case of the body on Waterloo Bridge, but there's also some obscure, strange cases, such as a peculiar case of poison and witchcraft at Wimbledon. I better sharpen my pencil and get on with it!
An interesting article appeared on Anglia Research about the history of birth certificates, including the highly important issue of just how widespread birth registration was. It turns out that not everyone in the past had one (dependent on how forgetful or chaotic their family was) - it's well worth reading if you're curious about that ancestor you can't find in the BMD index.
That's all for now - stay tuned for more next time.
