John Rees Coleford 1841 (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, December 06, 2017, 16:24 (2553 days ago) @ Marj Rees

Hi Marj,
without wishing to step on Mike Pinchin's toes, I suspect his post came from his subscription membership of the British Newspaper Archive website, which is well-worth visiting - over the course of a few years I've taken-out several short subscriptions and found and downloaded hundreds of articles about members of my own family, it's a great resource. It can be searched free-of-charge even without a subscription, just by advising your name and email address, new members can get a number of free downloads, and after that can download unlimited numbers of old newspaper pages within just a month's membership so not too expensive at all, would maybe make a nice Christmas gift for yourself ? Indeed, I've found that even when not a paying-member, the B.N.A. email newletters often include "special offers", such as a month's subscription for a pound rather than the normal £12 ! (altho I think £12 say is far better value than a couple of FH magazines, for example). If one has prepared in advance, using the free-search and recording which papers and issues appear to contain interesting articles, after starting the paid-subscription dozens if not hundreds of pages can be downloaded in a very short time.

Yes the Chronicle were old newspapers, details of them as regards the BNA site here.

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/cheltenham-chronicle
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/gloucestershire-chronicle

As to visiting Gloster Archives, assuming they are open as I understand they have the builders in at the moment, I'm unsure whether you'll learn anything that isn't already in the old papers. In those days they covered court appearances etc in great detail, which probably negates the need for your trying to find the court's own records, altho I've experienced one instance of reading a report regarding a court adjournment prior to sentencing, but then never found the article about the sentence itself.. Using the following Archives Quick Search for "John Rees Coleford" only gives the one hit, which is clearly the same 1838 insolvency case discussed above.
http://ww3.gloucestershire.gov.uk/CalmView/
I'm unsure as to whether that Quick Search also searches their Genealogical Database, which was just one of the databases in their old and somewhat disjointed website ? The Genealogical search can also give interesting hits such as Wills, although I think much of this database is nowadays also covered by Ancestry.
http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/genealogical-database/

Of course, it may be that searching using less-specific inputs may yield more results, the BNA website is definitely an example of a site whose search engine benefits from the "less is more" approach, for the BNA I'd recommend using the date and location/newspaper filters to narrow down the results, and then plough thro all the "Rees" (and then "Reece" etc) hits, not just the "John Rees Coleford" ones, and so on.

atb for now, Jeff.