Open Day at East Sussex Record Office

I have to admit I was in two minds about whether to make my way down to Lewes, East Sussex on Sunday for the Family History Open Day at the East Sussex Record Office. Being a Sunday public transport was an issue and the weather wasn’t particularly brilliant either, but in the end I was glad I went.

I was a little disappointed to find it so busy, I know that is good for them, but it did make things a little awkward in the cramped surroundings of the record office and meant that I didn’t get chance to take one of the behind the scenes tour, which were booked up until well into the afternoon.

The search room itself was a buzz of activity compared to its usual quiet atmosphere. There were two local family history society stalls here, representatives of the local library service, a display on the new record office “The Keep” and a selection of documents on display.

Most visitors however seemed to be taking the opportunity to explore the shelves around the outside of the search room, where various books, catalogues and transcriptions are held. Not wishing to be left out I took the opportunity to take a look at some Brighton Directories to see if I could find some mention of Frank TROWER’s brother, but to no avail.

For me though the most fascinating and instructive experience of my visit was watching the conservator at work, demonstrating how to clean a map and discussing other aspects of document preservation and conservation, and how to use a nutmeg grater when cleaning a map!

It was a really good day, with the cramped environment of the record office being the only drawback on the whole event. This just highlights the need for a new record office and fortunately work has recently begun on the new building, although it will be a couple of years before it opens for business.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

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Postcard Album: The Schools, Framfield, Sussex

Many months ago I showed you a postcard of the school in Framfield, Sussex which was really the school building rather than todays postcard which hardly shows anything of the building, but instead shows the school in terms of the children that made up the school.

This really is a delightful postcard, admittedly the quality is not brilliant but what I really like is that this doesn’t have the formality of normal school photos, with children lined up in rows. Here we find the children all over the place, some in the road, some peering through the hedge and some even climbing in the hedge by the look of it.

The majority are standing, but there are some kneeling, one little boy on his hands and knees and a couple of boys lying in the road. If you look really closely it looks like four of the boys have bottles in their hands, one boy in the middle looks like he might be saluting, but I think he is probably taking a swig from his bottle. And not a teacher to be seen anywhere.

The sad thing of course is that we don’t know who any of these children are, although I feel sure that there must be several HEMSLEY children among this lot and probably a few other relatives. Unfortunately I don’t have any other photos to compare this against, but I would guess this dates from around 1910.

Interestingly when you compare this with the other postcard it also looks like the photograph has been flipped, the school building should be on the left hand side of the postcard. I wonder whether this was an accident or whether the publisher (A.H. Homewood of Burgess Hill, Sussex) thought it looked better this way?

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

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Finding Frank: his death certificate

One of the key pieces of information missing from the limited information available about the F TROWER recorded on the Brighton War Memorial was how old he was when he died.

It was fairly obvious that in the absence of helpful genealogical information (other than the name and address of his brother) that finding out when he was born was going to be especially crucial if I was going to place him in my family tree.

The most obvious way of finding this out was to order a copy of his death certificate. Yes, you can get death certificates for men who died during the First World War, they are not that different from a normal death certificate and can be ordered from the GRO website in a similar manner and for the same cost.

They don’t tell you a great deal more than what is recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website and in Soldiers Died in the Great War, but in my case Frank’s age was missing from both of these sources.

For Frank the following information was recorded, and as you can see there wasn’t really any new information other than his age:

Rgtl. or Army number: G/15980
Rank: Pte.
Name in Full (Surname First): TROWER Frank (13th Bn.)
Age: 36
Country of Birth: England
Date of Death: 19:6:1917
Place of Death: France
Cause of Death: Killed in action

So Frank was 36 years old when he died on the 19th June 1917, which in theory means that he was born between the 20th June 1880 (if he died on the day before his 37th birthday) and the 19th June 1881 (if he died on his 36th birthday) if my maths is correct. This fits quite nicely with the census information that I have which starts with a one year old Frank in 1881.

Unfortunately this doesn’t fits quite so well with the most likely Frank TROWER in the GRO Birth Indexes. The most promising match is a birth registered in Steyning Registration District (which included the parish of Hove) in Q4 1879. The next registration in the index is also in Steyning Registration District, but in Q2 1883 which is perhaps a little too late.

So although I have a good match with the census information, I don’t have a good match for his birth registration. I am not sure whether this is really a problem or not, we have to accept that things don’t always tie-up quite as neatly as we would like sometimes.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

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Wordless Wednesday: Cuckfield Church, West Sussex

Holy Trinity Church, Cuckfield, West Sussex

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

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All Roads Lead Home and natural navigation

Regular readers of my blog will know that I don’t watch much television (I never even got around to watching the latest series of Who Do You Think You Are?), but there was one series recently that I made an effort to watch, albeit on BBC iPlayer rather than when it was actually broadcast.

The series was called All Roads Lead Home and was about the subject of natural navigation. There were only three episodes in this series, and the idea of the show was for three celebrities to find their way around the landscape without the use of a map, compass or GPS, and using only the clues provided by nature (and the occasional man-made clues like churches and graveyards).

The series didn’t receive particularly rave reviews, partly I think because people were expecting the celebrities to be dumped in some remote corner of Britain and then be expected to find their way home. Instead the walks they made were much shorter, between fixed points and they were given a guidebook which gave them directions such as “at the next junction take the south-west path”, they just had to use the clues to figure out which direction that was.

I found the series very enjoyable, natural navigation is something that has intrigued me for a while, the expert on the series was Tristan Gooley, and I already have his book The Natural Navigator on my shelf and have been following his blog for a while. It also helped that the celebrities received their training at West Dean House near Chichester, West Sussex, which featured in clips in the series along with the parish church at West Dean and the South Downs.

For the family historian episode two was particularly pertinent, when the group visited Ireland, ancestral home of one of the celebrities, Stephen Mangan. This episode was much more about finding his roots and exploring the landscape of his ancestors. Natural navigation requires that you pay greater attention to your surroundings and not just turning up in a car as they usually do on Who Do You Think You Are? and this is a useful lesson for anyone wanting to really get to know about where your ancestors lived.

I know I am over reliant on maps when I go walking (although I rarely use a compass), and I know that when I first walked the South Downs Way last year I enjoyed it much more when I actually put the guidebook away and began to see the landscape around me. Searching for natural clues or in my case for the waymarking provided is a great way of opening your eyes to your surroundings, rather than having one eye constantly on the map, waiting for the next change in direction. Hopefully this programme will encourage me to put the map away a bit more often when I go out wandering.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.