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Long Reads

College Green, Bristol ca 1830

Mrs Frances Ruscombe and her maid, Mary Champness, otherwise Sweet: A double murder at College Green

On Thursday 27 September 1764, a spinster in late middle-age, Miss Jefferies, went to her sister Frances’s house on College Green where she had been invited to dine at 12 noon. It appears the...
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Dp Lindegaard, social historian, Bristol

Tracing my ancestry – How did it all begin for me?

Would any of this have happened if we hadn’t come to Brislington to live? Perhaps, perhaps not. I  never had anything to do with Brislington before and although I knew vaguely that it was...
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Anna Maria Falconbridge – a life that would make a good Netflix series

My previous subject (Mary Kennedy, as far as we know) wrote only one line about her voyage to the other side of the World and back.  By contrast Anna Maria Falconbridge is her direct...
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Mary Kennedy – Adventures on the First Fleet and Beyond

Mary Kennedy of Baptists Mills in Bristol is one of an elite group of people who made landfall at Sydney Cove in January 1788. They numbered approximately 1,373 persons, consisting of convicts, male and...
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The Missing: Letters from the War, 1803-1815

A Man of War is a most miserable place,” so says 14 year-old sailor James Harding from St George, in 1810, as if we didn’t know from numerous films and TV. In the later...
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Survivor of Ravensbruck: Stefania Ekner, nee Biegarczyk, 1921-2001

Family History research often leads to something entirely unexpected. In 2014, my first cousin Jack GREGORY was due to attain a milestone birthday. What to give a 90 year-old-man? The majority of us who...
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A Victorian Girl

The Victorian Girl is the Cinderella story in reverse. Mary Britton, previously Leighton, was a dear old soul, who was “in Service’ in Downend from leaving school until her late marriage to Samuel Britton....
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