The Greenwood Tree – September 2026

Posted on 30th August 2026

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

The theme was another popular one attracting more than a dozen stories from members covering a wide range of their experiences when looking up their ancestors in the various census returns.

Perhaps the most intriguing was one sent in by four members of our Australia and New Zealand Out-of-Counties group, a joint effort which came in under the title Census Thrills, Puzzles and Oddities. One of those oddities involved an ancestral address listed as ‘In the Bath’.

Marilyn Gough did some detection work involving the censuses to track down the identity of the writer of a letter found in family memorabilia handed down by her grandmother. It was a sad letter about life as an emigrant in Canada from a woman called Mary to her mother back in the UK, ruing the fact that she had not heard from her parent for many years.

The census also played a big part, although as it turned out a misleading one, in Jillian Trethewey’s story of how she came to the UK from Australia to find a bridge in Somerset which a 19 th century ancestor had probably helped to construct.

Misleading returns was also an issue for Glen Jennings who discovered a tangled web involving a variety of names, one of them made up, in the census for her ancestor Matilda Hussey, making her a nightmare to track down. Jemima Buoy provided two census stories, one of them on that rarely mentioned topic, the column at the end of the census form to list the deaf, dumb and blind.

Other contributors on the magazine’s theme included Richard Smith. Ryan Weller, Sara Ellis, Wendy Morgan and Clare Brown.

In something of an experimental innovation, editor Paul Radford wondered what it would be like if you could interview Thomas Hardy about his life and family history. He employed the services of AI to be both interviewer and interviewee and the resulting imaginary chat proved quite interesting with an ‘explanation’ of how he came to write his novel Under the Greenwood Tree, after which our magazine was named.

More revelations about the 1891 Ox Roast on the frozen lake at Sherborne Castle, the subject of the SDFHS Photographic Project in the June edition, was provided by Sherborne School archivist Rachel Hassall, including correspondence between the man who cooked the ox and the school more than 50 years after the event.

Anne Warr, who represents the SDFHS at Family History fairs and who is the subject of the GT interview (real, not imagined), tells how she took up family history on a whim more than 30 years ago.

Regular features include Mike Whitaker’s Dorset Spotlight, this time on Maiden Newton, Letters to the Editor, What the Papers said, Dorset History Centre Roundup, Book Reviews and the SDFHS Photographic Project, featuring postcards and photos from a late member’s collection which was recently donated to the Society.

Paul Radford