Planning a trip to the Forest of Dean (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Thursday, June 20, 2013, 02:49 (4176 days ago) @ stockampreddy

Hi Donna,
yes more answers just give more questions don't they, but hey "a trouble shared is a trouble doubled" and all that.. ;-)
Main thing is always do as much advance preparation as you can, whatever the task.

1. There are other members who can far better answer these questions than I can. However here goes for starters. Re your various PRs, unlike you I don't have the full PR details in front of me, although I suspect they are within your earlier posts ?. Whatever, it MAY be easier if you posted them all again on a new thread then we could analyse and comment on each one hopefully without any confusion/ambiguity ?.
The thoughts of other users would be appreciated here, please ??

Do you hope to visit all relevant Chapels, or just those with possible family burials ? That said, even if you mean all of them in truth it can only be a handfull of possible sites to visit and all within a relatively small area. To be honest until 3 years ago when I started my own FH research, and mostly remotely having moved from the Forest 30 years ago, I had no appreciation of the seemingly huge number and variety of Chapels that were there. In my experience places of our family & friends' worship, Baptism, Marriage & Burial were always "standard" C of E (Church of England) Churches; "chapel" was a word from the past for me, often associated with old movies about the Welsh Valleys etc. I knew there was a Methodist (Wesley) and Baptist(Hall) "church" in my home town of Cinderford, but always believed them to be a variation of CofE that I knew at our St Stephens.
So when I see the word Chapel used in the PRs, I don't think this word should be taken too literally as a descriptive noun (rightly or wrongly I always thought of a Chapel as a "small" Church!), for my ancestors' PRs this "Chapel" invariably refers to one of the C of E Churches, so if Drybrook then it would be Holy Trinity, if my mum's family it's All Saints at Longhope, and so on. I do hope this makes sense and is at least part helping.... tricky to interprete your query and express my thinking.

I suggest for PRs that you're unsure about, maybe compare it's date with the following excellent webspage which gives a good timeline of the various main (ie CofE) Churches in the Forest, so you can decide whether the suspected Church was even built at the time the PR took place.
http://www.fweb.org.uk/local-history/13-Churches

When it come to the Non Conformist PRs, such as the Bible Christians, then the British History website I referenced above is "the" most accurate and detailed online history of the country I've found, it's taken from an official set of reference books running to many large volumes, enough to fill a large bookcase at our local reference library. If in doubt thats THE place to look.

You mention Baptisms at "Drybrook" for people living in "Littledean Woodside" & "Cinderford". To recap what I think you've learnt, Littledean (a village just outside/below the high inner Forest "proper") dates back far earlier than the towns within the less accessible "inner" Forest such as Cinderford and Drybrook. So when the oldest part of Cinderford first "grew" in the early 1800s, it was initially called Woodside or Littledean Woodside, eventually becoming known as the "new" town of Cinderford. This is on the extreme East of the Forest. It was a huge surprise to this Son of Cinderford, nowadays signifcantly larger than Littldean, to find no mention of Cinderford on maps c1800 which clearly show Littledean and nearby Flaxley (Abbey). The first CofE Church in Cinderford was St Johns. Several years before this was built the first CofE Church within the "inner" Forest area was Holy Trinity at Harrow(Harry) Hill near Drybrook, people from far and wide travelled to use it every Sabbath, even walking thro' the woods from the likes of Cinderford over a mile away. Hence historically and traditionally it's become known as "The Forest Church" although others were of course built in subsequent years as the population boomed.
If you travel to the far western side of the Forest near ancient St Briavels as JH visited, near there is equally ancient Newland Church which is called "The Cathedral of The Forest"; or a few miles to the north and you'll find another very old Church, Ruardean (St Johns) which is only 15 minutes drive from Drybrook. These and Littledean Church are all on the edge of the Forest, more attractive & more easily accessible areas to inhabit and cultivate in medieval times when agriculture was king, long before the inner Forest "proper" was opened up to industry and the resultant worker influx who needed places of Worship closer to their homes.
Hope that helped set the scene albeit slightly off at a tangent.

You mention a "private baptism", is this a query ?. Sometimes they were private as the parents were perhaps trying to hide something embarrassing from their neighbours.. it was I think more normal to hold Baptisms as part of a routine Sunday Service so in front of the whole Congregation so most of that village or Parish, unlike Marriages and Funeral/Burials which are perhaps more of a family invitation nature, certainly nowadays.
(My answer to your Part 2 follows below)