RootsChat.Com

Coincidences!  Such small co-incidences can pepper a life with interest. (Gail Honeyman)

I am going to Stalbridge on 6th July with my sister and brother in law where we will be staying with my cousin and her husband who live there.  They moved there when their only son who was in the army then married a Dorset girl and settled in Shillingstone.  With no real ties to keep them in Suffolk they moved down to Dorset so they could see more of their 2 grand daughters. 

The first time my brother in law visited them said he wanted to visit Milborne Port which he'd discovered was just over the border in Somerset.   I'd previously done his family tree and some of his ancestors are buried there.   We all trooped out to the churchyard one day and were lucky enough to find their graves.   He was delighted as you can imagine.

Most people outside of Dorset have never heard of Stalbridge so to see it mentioned here has brought up lots of lovely memories with, no doubt, more to be made in July.

Annette

Lowest form of wit.  No hard feelings!

Interesting trip out today, 30 miles down the track from Radstock to Stalbridge, just inside the Dorset border and the paternal family area.I have traced, in one way or another, the family back to about 1650, but today was not specifically on that tack.
For many year most of the village, houses buildings and land (now a town!) was in private ownership, but in 1918, for  whatever reason, the owner Lord Stalbridge, of the Grosvenor dynasty, decided to put the whole lot up for auction. Recently the Stalbridge History Society have put together a wonderful book telling of that event. For three days this week they held an exhibition in the Stalbridge Hall showing much detail of the outcome of that sale, with maps and photographs and many stories about "STALBRIDGE SOLD".
Although it is my "ancestral homeland" and I have lots of family history information from there, it is many years since I had visited the town.
One of the people to whom I spoke during the couple of hours I was there turned out to be a distant relative whom I had never met but whose family name I could recall from my own FH search.
I brought home with me a copy of the book prepared by the History Group , and whilst most of my nearest relations had, by 1918, left the village, I can forsee many hours of "dipping pleasure" to see what, if any family secrets of mine it contains.

I've just donated 2 metres line of books relating to Miltary Aviation (except ATC) to the Air Ambulance, to try and make more book shelving space for more Aviation Books, Technical Manuals and Air Traffic Control.

A box of Air Ministry Air Publications has gone to an Aviation Museum Archive, because they didn't hold them.

The RAF Museum Archive had one of mine, because it was the only surviving 1935 Edition. The World's Libraries don't have one listed.

I am interested in the development of Air Traffic Control and the Distress Organisation.

I find it difficult to part with anything.

Mark

I know that feeling!