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The SDFHS Blog

A Day Out at the Seaside

Posted on 1st May 2020

Following on from an earlier blog about unidentified photographs I can share the story of this lovely family group The photograph was taken in Boscombe on 17 September 1889 Some years ago I inherited a box of old family photographs that had belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Mary SCARD, she married (in 1894) George John PITFIELD, this photo was amongst them Needless to say none was identified - so frustrating! I tried for years to try to find out who the people in the photos were, I had... more

A Tale of Two Postcards

Posted on 15th April 2020

On 8 February I was helping the Society's Fairs Co-ordinator, Anne Warr, on the SDFHS stand at the Family History Show in Bristol and during a brief lull in visitors to our table, I went to check out a stall with postcards for sale I made a bee-line for the Cumbrian ones and bought half a dozen including this interesting postcard showing a tram in Carlisle The message on it and the stamp on the back show that it was posted in 1902 Coincidently that was the year that the... more

All change for our website

Posted on 3rd April 2020

We hope you like our new look website And did you know we have a new Website Manager We welcome Chris Hall Chris lives in Texas and he tells us: My day job is Chief Technology Officer of a small software company We build websites, web-based enterprise software, mobile apps, etc Many of the sites we build run on the WordPress platform As the Society site is built on WordPress, this will be very familiar to me I have authored many plug-ins as we tailor WordPress for specific client... more

The Greenwood Tree – March 2020

Posted on 24th February 2020

The theme of the March edition of The Greenwood Tree is 'grandmothers', and readers sent in some interesting and intriguing tales of their female ancestors Editor Paul Radford previews the edition 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 Richard Smith's Swedish grandmother There were plenty of tales of the unexpected in the flood of grandmother, great-grandmother and... more

A Merry Christmas Miscellany

Posted on 23rd December 2019

Now what do you think of this magnificent Christmas spread found amongst the festive displays at the local garden centre here in Sherborne While all the smaller kids, having first fought their way through rows of ‘fur’ coats - the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe style - were viewing the little festive trains chugging around a snowy Christmas village, some of us bigger kids were enjoying the skill and ingenuity that went into this ‘knit your own Christmas Dinner’ I laughed as two 30+... more

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