May 2017 - Somerset & Dorset Family History Society

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The Greenwood Tree – June 2017

Posted on 30th May 2017

The June issue of The Greenwood Tree will be appearing shortly and is due to be posted to all 2017 Members this week It can also be viewed and/or downloaded as a PDF file in the Members’ Area of our website As we did in the March issue, we have preserved the colour content in the digital version, so it’s well worth having a look on-line In addition to the usual wide range of articles, this issue contains details (yellow page i, and p61) of the Society's annual... more

Creating and printing your own personalised family tree

Posted on 18th May 2017

I fell into using a desktop publishing package quite by chance In the village in which I was living a skilled resident had taken the local parish council newsletter, sent three times a year to all residents, and the parish church news, distributed six times a year, to church parishioners, and turned them into very satisfactory publications from the cutting and pasting of paper and photocopying that had been done before He liaised with a helpful local printing company and the results were much... more

Railway Staff in East Dorset

Posted on 9th May 2017

We are very pleased to announce that an important dataset has been added to the Members’ Area of our website, thanks to the generosity of Peter Russell (of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust) Together with Colin Divall, Emeritus Professor of Railway Studies at York University, he has been studying the railways around East Dorset, including the careers and families of those who worked on the railway from the 1840s to the 1970s, particularly in the Wimborne area, where both Peter... more

From Slavery to the Workhouse

Posted on 2nd May 2017

I am sure many of us have discovered that one or more of our early family members went into the workhouse Sitting at our computers in our centrally heated homes we have tried to imagine what it might have been like with, perhaps, images coming to mind of Oliver Twist asking for more, or the heavily pregnant Fanny Robin, in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, painfully making her way to the workhouse to meet her fate We are likely to have gleaned that this was to be avoided at all... more

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