Was your ancestor married by a witchfinder?
Well… sort of…. During the Commonwealth, from the time of the 1653 Marriage Act to the Restoration in 1660, marriages weren’t performed by cle...
Author: Helen Barrell
Talk: Wivenhoe’s epidemics
Just a quick note – I’m giving a talk for the Wivenhoe History Group at the William Loveless Hall in Wivenhoe on Wednesday 8th July at 7.30pm. All a...
Caught by surprise in Little Bromley
As you might have noticed, notes in parish registers fascinate me. One I came across the other day seemed to pack quite a story into just one sentence. In the e...
The Strawbridges: a 1930s motorcycling family
Last year, I wrote about the headstones in St. George’s, Harborne, and mentioned the unusual monument to Freda Strawbridge, a young woman who died in a mo...
Review: 24 Hours in the Past
Rather like I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here crossed with Tony Robinsons’ The Worst Jobs in History, this four-episode living history series took ...
Review: The Game
I’ve lived in Birmingham for several years, long enough to get confused sometimes when my brain forgets what the new Bull Ring shopping centre looks like ...
A soldier’s photos from 1945
The 70th anniversary of VE Day seemed like a good time to blog about my grandad’s soldier photos from WW2 – mainly because, although there’s n...
Essex Record Office project to make marriage licence allegations more accessible
Marriage licence bonds and allegations have proved to be very useful in my research. Sometimes I might see that a marriage was performed by licence, and I ask t...
Workers’ Memorial Day – “Remember the dead, fight for the living.”
There was a terrible accident at the ropery on Wivenhoe High Street on 19th February 1855, when a boiler exploded. It killed three lads – Henry Browne (ag...
A witchfinder, an admiral, P. G. Wodehouse, the Boleyns and me
Strange things start to happen if you can trace your family back far enough, and if you can find a thread which is, let’s be honest… posh. In trying...