Dean & Glostershire Reference Books freely readable online (General)
by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, October 03, 2012, 02:20 (4430 days ago)
"This wonderfull site has HG Nicholl's great books about the Forest to read on line, and strongly recommended they are too:".....
Later Edit:
please read the following post, same basic post as this albeit in an improved/corrected version:
Thanks, Jeff.
Dean & Glostershire Reference Books freely readable online
by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Thursday, October 04, 2012, 20:24 (4428 days ago) @ Jefff
I mistakenly tucked this into a thread a few days ago, but given the seemingly high interest please excuse me moving it to a more prominent spot to hopefully benefit a few more forum users.
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This wonderfull FoD FH site has HG Nicholl's great books about the C19th Forest to read on line, and strongly recommended they are too:
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/?eBooks
Although already wellknown to many of you I still feel I should mention the superb Victoria British History site which is always worth studying, although sadly this site doesn't yet include the Huntley volume:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=97
Additionally, during my many internet searches for reference material I've found a couple of usefull websites that also carry books to read online, I hope they will be of interest to others, some examples are below:
Toronto University site carries a huge database of e-books for free access it seems, although please note it can take a while to load:
A great example is "The Forest of Dean" by Arthur Cooke, 1916:
http://archive.org/details/cu31924028028920
http://archive.org/details/gloucestershiren01londuoft
This particular hit leads to the old but interesting periodical magazines "Gloucestershire Notes", almost a forerunner of this forum but on a County scale. However searching the site may well find other interesting books, such as the. Each book can then be read, or searched, online.
Searching "Gloucestershire" (for example, this can be changed) gives many more hits as follows:
http://archive.org/search.php?query=gloucestershire%20AND%20collection%3Atoronto
I particularly like this one relating to Glostershire Dialects, from 1890:
http://archive.org/details/glossaryofdialec25robeuoft
eg "my song!" is a frequent exclamation in the Forest of Dean, meaning "Dear me!"....... don't think its so "frequent" nowadays ?. As a 70s boy most of us born & bred Foresters in our Cinderford road could barely understand the "real" Vurrest spoken by our elderly (and always heavily-suited & clothcapped) neighbour, this book would have been a Godsend back then !
The following site really does have a wealth of books, altho' the search engine needs carefull patient driving, why it didn't produce these WPW Phillimore Parish Marriages books on the earlier search I'm unsure ?!.
http://archive.org/search.php?query=gloucestershire%20notes
Unfortunately of these hits only Vol 16 on this site includes part of Dean, in this case Huntley. Volume 14 does include Broadwell, but this is the Cotswolds one.
However Volume 9, Michel Dean, is here:
http://www.uk-genealogy.org.uk/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?action=ViewRec&DB=8&bookID=37...
Whereas nearby Bromesberrow and Minsterworth from Volume 17 are on the excellent Parish Mouse site:
http://parishmouse.co.uk/2011/08/25/bromesberrow-marriages-1675-to-1724/
http://parishmouse.co.uk/?s=minsterworth
Whether all these Marriage records are already covered within the FoD FHS database, I don't know; my intention here is to show that carefull use of search engines can occasionally give great results and perhaps save researcher's cash too, so they can hopefully contribute toward this FoDFHS site's upkeep instead.
Also of possible interest is the Domesday Book Online site:
http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/gloucestershire.html
Finally, as an example of the diversity available, while researching a Longhope ancestor and his WWI records I found this excellent book. It took months of searching for him, largely due to poorly transcribed War Office records and partly as we thought he was a trenches soldier not a landlocked sailor !
This book has given us invaluable background to his sad death in October 1918 after serving over 3 years in the French mud, in a unit to my surprise I'd never heard of.
http://www.wereldoorlog1418.nl/RND-Royal-Naval-Division/index.html
No doubt there are many other similarly usefull, perhaps out of print, books available to read online. It's GREAT when tinternet electrickery works as it was intended.
Hope this helps, Jeff.
If anyone else knows any more then please feel free to share them, thanks.