The Greenwood Tree – March 2026

Posted on 28th February 2026

The theme of the March issue of The Greenwood Tree is Longevity. Editor Paul Radford previews the magazine which will be mailed to members at the end of February and which SDFHS members can already view or download from the Members’ Area of the Society’s website.

Rachel Hassall delves into the archives of Somerset & Dorset & Queries to find tales of long lives and comes up with some startling examples, including a man whose headstone declares he died at the age of 153 (though there was considerable doubt about the authenticity of that claim), and the oldest woman in Dorset who was 126.

George Tatham tells the story of a Waterloo veteran from Dorset who lived to be 91 and whose regiment turned up en masse to give him a spectacular send-off at his funeral in Holwell. Ellen Duffy has real longevity in her Somerset tree. Her 2xgreat-grandmother, who died at 90, had a mother who lived to be 93 and a grandmother who was a centenarian.

Other contributors to the theme are Richard Smith, Ted Udall and GT editor Paul Radford. In What The Papers Said, Teresa Williams finds a number of centenarians from our two counties while John Tanner explores the earliest known photographs of people in the SDFHS Photographic Project.

In other stories, Michael Pitfield lifts the lid on the little-known tale of how Barbary Pirates raided the Dorset coast from the late 16 th to the early 18 th century to snatch people who were then enslaved in North Africa. The same topic is taken up in the regular roundup of news from the Dorset History Centre. Michael, the man behind the SDFHS decision to instigate Out-of-Counties Groups, is also the subject of the GT interview.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking contribution comes from Chris Jefferys in Australia. She muses on the complications of researching your family history in an immigrant country and poses many questions about identity that most of us must have asked ourselves along the way.

Richard Smith finds Dorset’s own Florence Nightingale, Ann Winzar, a lady who heroically tended to the wounded at Waterloo and whose courage endeared her to soldiers in Wellington’s Army. Margaret Rice offers a fascinating story about how Scottish poet Alexander Anderson wrote a series of poems about three Scottish brothers Named Maxwell, as small children. The brothers later moved south and worked as drapers in Taunton.

Regular features include Mike Whitaker’s Dorset Spotlight, this time on Frampton, Letters to the Editor, House History and Book Reviews.

Paul Radford