01935 429609
Somerset & Dorset
Family History Society

The SDFHS Blog

Crime – or was it poverty? – and punishment

Imagine that you had lived in a Somerset or Dorset village or town your entire life You had perhaps never seen the sea or ventured further than the immediate environs of your home Then you commit what was deemed a crime and are transported to the other side of the world It must have seemed terrifying and almost beyond comprehension Transportation was not at all uncommon in England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century Amazingly to us, the penalty was at first considered an act...
more

A Ghost in the Family

To discover that you may be descended from a lecherous murdering ghost is a startling experience and an indication that tracing your ancestry may not lead only to hidden fortunes and extinct peerages! The PITFIELDS are an old Dorset family - there is at least one reference to a ‘Pytfold’ in the Domesday book - which seems to have originated in the Allington area of the county and gradually spread out The first reference to my ancestor Sebastian Pitfield (1625 - 1685) occurs in the...
more

The 1642 Protestation Returns

One of the things I thought I could usefully do during lockdown was to transcribe some of the wills and other old documents that I’d collected over the past few years I’d never made much progress with this as I’d found most of them unreadable; partly because they were often in Latin but mainly because of the early English scripts in which they were written Despite having attended excellent workshops led by the SDFHS Secretary, Ted Udall, on ‘Reading Old Documents’, I hadn’t put...
more

The Greenwood Tree – September 2020

Members came up trumps once again with their tales of the Black Sheep of their respective families in what proved to be a popular theme for The Greenwood Tree’s September edition For the second successive issue (and for no extra charge) four more pages were added to provide a suitable platform for some intriguing stories Editor Paul Radford previews the edition 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...
more

Lord Dorset’s Recompense

Serendipity (unexpected and fortunate discoveries) can be a marvelous feeling, not least in the course of family history research Some years ago at the British Library, I noticed, quite by chance, that it has an Index of Names associated with its Manuscripts Collection Such indices are invaluable to genealogists Nothing ventured, I inserted the name ‘PITFIELD’ and the search referred me to an amazing document This is a letter from Thomas SACKVILLE, first Earl of Dorset, who was the Lord...
more

Archives