In the local studies library at the Dorset History Centre you can find a large collection of journals. These journals are packed with fascinating articles and are often an underused resource. In this new series of blogs we will be highlighting some of the interesting articles within them!
In this first blog we will be looking at journals published before 1910.
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The earliest journal in our collection is the first volume of The Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Society, which was published in 1877.
Flicking through the articles contained in the early issues of this journal you will become very familiar with the phrase ‘inferior Oolite’, which is a type of soil from the Jurassic period, which seems to feature a lot in the geology articles.
As well as geology you can find information on subjects as varied as old glass bottles from Thornford, the ennobling of beets, hourglasses from churches and new and rare British Spiders.
One of our favourite articles is found in volume 23 from 1902. It was written by Nelson M Richardson, although he admits that most of the paper was written by his wife who created a diary recording a pair of thrushes in their garden in Chickerell. The diary records the activity of the birds from nest building until their babies left the nest. Many of the entries just record when the chicks were fed, which parent fed them and what they were fed, but others are longer, like this entry from April 14th:
1.34pm Hen flew away; cock came with several worms, fed young, and flew away.
The down is coming off the young birds fast; they seem to clean it off their bodies with their bills, and get it off their head sometimes by scratching with their feet, sometimes by rubbing their heads under their wings.
One young bird is stronger and more active than the others: he sits on their backs and flaps his wings, and is altogether more lively.
On one occasion the cock brought one or two smallish worms and one very long one; two of the young birds got hold each of an end of the long worm and swallowed it as far as they could. This disturbed the cock much; he watched them for a few seconds and then took hold of the worm between the two bills, but it did not come in half, so he did it again, with the same want of success. He then caught hold of it and pulled it up out of the throat of the young one who had had a worm before and gave it into the bill of the one who had not.
As well as the entries the paper includes table showing how often the chicks were fed and some photographs.
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We hold four other journals that have issues published:
- The Dorset Horn Sheep Breeders provides the names and addresses of breeders of Dorset Horn Sheep and records the lambs born on their farms.
- The Proceedings of the Bournemouth Natural History Society contains a few articles and The Dorset Yearbook contains a few stories and poems, but in their earliest issues the majority of these publications are filled with descriptions of the excursions and dinners held by the members of the respective societies.
- Finally, there is Dorset Notes and Queries. As the name suggests this journal is a collection of short notes on a variety of subjects ranging from an argument identifying the site of King Arthur’s famous Battle of Badon as Badbury Rings, to descriptions of playgrounds game that were played when the author was a child. There are also transcripts of record sets, which must have been incredibly useful for researchers.
Mixed in with this information are many questions sent in by readers, which bear a striking similarity to a lot of queries we receive in our email inbox today. There are requests for information about ancestors or houses and villages, and enquiries as to whether anyone holds a copy of a document the writer is interested in viewing. There are also the more unusual enquiries such as a question about when egg shells gain their colour, a request for words that are used when communicating with animals and an enquiry about the definition of ‘Fittahot’. An internet search did not reveal the answer to this last query, but there is a reply that appears in the journal suggesting that the word may actually be ‘Fittchot’, an old wold for the Polecat. This just goes to show that you can learn things in our journals that even the internet can’t tell you!