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Somerset & Dorset
Family History Society

Barry Brock

The Greenwood Tree – May 2016

The May edition of The Greenwood Tree will be mailed to members this week The Editor, Bob Barber, gives a preview of the contents The rather startling front cover of the May issue of The Greenwood Tree highlights an important new venture by the Society: The Somerset and Dorset Photographs Project Photographs are an important part of family history, triggering and cementing memories of the past, as Barbara Elsmore described in a previous post A major new initiative for the Society has been the...
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The Sherborne Pageant of 1905

In 1905, to mark the 1,200th anniversary of the founding of the town of Sherborne by Bishop St Aldhelm in 705, the local Church Council decided to mark the event with a historical pageant which, during the planning, grew in size to involve 900 local people and was staged in the grounds of Sherborne’s ruined 12th Century castle A team of researchers at King’s College, London is currently studying historical pageants for a major AHRC-funded Research Project and on Saturday 4 July Dr Tom...
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Zulus in Sherborne

The first of our 2015 Sherborne events took place yesterday when Col Iain Swinnerton described the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, followed by a wine-tasting of six South African wines The main events of the Anglo-Zulu war are very familiar to anyone who has seen the film Zulu (all but one of us present yesterday had seen it - some many times!) and its later prequel Zulu Dawn (rather fewer had seen this film) but we all welcomed the opportunity to hear the expert views of the SDFHS Military Advisor,...
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Industrial Archaeology Day

Our last Saturday event of the year was a real tour de force by Graham Bendell and Barry Brock who described aspects of Sherborne’s industrial heritage in a series of short illustrated talks which contained a positive wealth of information ‘Industrial Archaeology Day’ (held at our Family History Centre in Sherborne on 22 November) was chaired by George Tatham who said in his introduction that the afternoon could only provide a ‘taster’ of the subjects to be discussed and that he...
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Sherborne’s vanished pubs

Yesterday evening (17th July) saw Barry Brock, the Manager of our Family History Centre, suitably kitted out in a luminous safety jacket, guiding a group of us around the streets of Sherborne, on the trail of the town’s vanished pubs This was the first of four such pub walks (definitely not pub crawls!) that the Society has organized this summer We originally set three dates but these all booked up so quickly that we recently added a fourth - on Thursday 7th August (places still available...
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Member and Guest Blogs Welcome

We welcome guest and member blog posts on any topic with a family history connection and invite you to send your contributions, which should include photo/photos, to the editor Barbara Elsmore

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