broadwell (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Tuesday, April 08, 2014, 14:59 (3883 days ago) @ doran54

No problem Doran. As said earlier, I hope your trip wasn't entirely wasted and am really pleased to hear you intend visiting again, please keep us updated as it's always nice to hear about forum members successes in their researches.
Hopefully the weather will continue to improve, if you can I suggest visits in early July or early September, so cunningly missing the school holidays and the associated rain ! and the toruist crowds. If you care to search this forum there have been several threads in the past wrt suggested places to visit or stay in the Dean, just search "tourism" and the like.

Meanwhile, did you have any specific part of Broadwell you were trying to find, a house perhaps ?. One way of trying to find a specific location on a Census form, say, when it's not so obvious such as in the sprawling forest hamlets (unlike with numbers on a town's street, say) is to study the Census form and look at the houses immediately preceding and following "yours", ideally using a close scale OS map (www.old-maps.co.uk) which often name individual properties. The details for the households on a census form were probably collected by one official who would invariably have followed the shortest logical route to cover his patch, often on foot. Some of the addresses on the form might be more obvious to identify nowadays (pub, vicarage, farm, etc) than others, especially in those days when many properties were identified by the householder's name rather than a house name, number or postcode.

Re your Broadwell search, if you're trying to pinpoint a particular address or place and we cannot help on the forum, I may be able to help as my sister lives in nearby Coalway, given sufficient guidance and time from you she might be able to do some groundwork for you. Similarly there are other forum users who might be able to advise, especially now the weather's more conducive to a spring walk.

Jeff