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 series of blogs we will be highlighting some of the interesting articles within them!
This is the eighth in our series of blogs looking at the journals held at the Dorset History Centre. In this blog we will look at two journals, The Greenwood Tree, the magazine of the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society, and the earliest of our journals concerning local authors, The Jane Austen Society Report.
Jane Austen did not live in Dorset, but she had a strong connection with Lyme Regis, which features in her novel Persuasion. The Jane Austen Society was founded in 1940, but the earliest Society report we hold is from 1975. This report contains articles on ‘Jane Austen and the State of the Nation’ and ‘The England of Jane Austen’, but we couldn’t help being drawn to the short article by J.W. Martin discussing strawberries.
The article focuses on a scene from Emma in which there is a party picking strawberries at Donwell Abbey. Mrs Elton gives a monologue about strawberries in which she references three varieties, ‘hautboy’, which is superior, but scarce, ‘Chili’ which she says is preferred and ‘white wood’, which is said to have the finest flavour of all. This is significant because the period when Emma was written coincided with a large change in the cultivation of strawberries in Europe.
The ‘white wood’ is the smaller strawberry Fragaria vesca, that is still occasionally grown today. The ‘hautboy’, Fragaria moschata, was always the rarest of these strawberries and the article suggests that it had died out, although an internet search reveals it still grows wild in parts of eastern Europe.
In 1790 near Paris a strawberry from America was accidently hybridised with a strawberry from Chile and produced fruits that were larger and juicier than those already being grown. This variety, known as ‘Chili’, quickly became the most popular and is the ancestor of the modern varieties we have today.
If Emma had been written a few years later there may have been no discussion about varieties as the Chili would probably have been the only one picked.
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The Greenwood Tree began in 1975 and is still being published today. The first volume is predominantly an introduction to the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society, but later volumes contain articles about family history discoveries and tips on genealogy.
In Volume 2 Issue 1 from Winter 1976 Daphne Hills writes about her experience transcribing the registers of Blandford St Mary. She gives tips on what to do when handwriting is hard to read, such as looking at other examples in the same handwriting to see how letters are formed and searching the records for other instances of the same name that may be more clearly written. She also picks out a few interesting things that she found whilst transcribing. These include an entry from 1775, Mary, wife of John Williams who died of smallpox was buried at the hour of 11 o’clock at night, and a note that from 1633-37 someone with what she calls ‘a childish hand’ has put in extra year headings in all the wrong places causing some confusion.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is where she discusses what she calls the ‘Gretna Green period’ in the registers. This refers to the extraordinary number of marriages that took place in Blandford St Mary between 1690 and 1755 where neither party in the marriage was resident in the parish. In her book A Village Heritage T.F. Almack records that between 1695 and 1755, 737 marriages are recorded in the registers and in only 28 of these were either one or both of the parties described as ‘of this parish’. 172 parishes from Dorset and 39 places outside of the county are represented in these registers.
It seems likely that the practice of outsiders marrying in Blandford St Mary stopped in 1755 due to the enforcement of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but no one seems to know how the practice started or why Blandford St Mary was such a popular place to marry!
Reading this article also gives an insight into the amount of work it took to create the transcripts of parish records that we still refer to today. Daphne Hills spent eighty hours at the archive copying the registers and as long again typing and indexing them. She records how she created the index by writing the entries onto alphabetically headed sheets and then cut the paper into small strips, ordered them and copied them on a rough piece of paper before checking them and typing them up. This seems like a long-winded method, but she writes that it is better than typing them up and finding a single mistake which would lead to the whole sheet having to be redone.
Despite the changes in the way family history is researched, looking at an index of a transcript of parish records is still one of the quickest and easiest ways of identifying family groups and we are very grateful to the volunteers who put hours of work into creating them.
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This is the eighth in our series looking at our academic journals. You can read other blogs by clicking on the link below: