“Soft Rainy Morn. Bradford Fair. Heard Samuel Myers Mason say when repairing Tadcaster dam they found a great deal many human Skeletons near the Surface…”
Category: local history
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Remembrance
Like most Europeans, I had more than one ancestor killed in World War One. Today I found my photos of one of them. He died just over 100 years ago – my dad spoke of him when we were growing up, and his other uncle who died in 1917. I thought it was very […]
On October 14th, 1888, Augustin Louis Le Prince shot the world’s oldest surviving piece of film – in a Leeds suburban garden. Widely known as the “Roundhay Garden Scene”, the footage was shot by Louis Le Prince at the now demolished Roundhay Cottage, later known as Oakwood Grange, Roundhay in Leeds, and featured Le […]
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At Old Willy’s One Night
Archives were shut, yesterday, for some reason or other so I had to content myself with the Reference Library instead. Ended up spending some time in the company of Robert Sharp; a shepherd’s son who became schoolmaster at North Cave, East Riding of Yorkshire, from 1804 to 1842. To entertain his grown up […]
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The Saxton Spindler
In Europe the handspindle was the only tool for spinning yarn until the early Renaissance, when the spinning wheel appeared. Simple spindles produced all the thread, yarns and cordage for household use, for commerce and for war, for at least 9,000 years. The handspindle met all these human needs: clothing, household linens, uniforms for the […]
Sometimes, even very official looking historical sources get it wrong. This slightly limb-challenged gentleman is my ‘Uncle Walt’, the miller at South Duffield; born the son of a miller in Braithwaite, Yorkshire. I have this very photo but don’t appear to have scanned my version, so will link to it, here. Do click […]
“Victorian parlour ladies” has become a derogatory phrase when it comes to describing the history of crafts. I wrote this some time ago for Love:Crochet. Crochet is not ‘my’ craft but it was interesting to look at its history, as it was so beloved of the “Victorian parlour ladies” of the 1840s and sheds some […]
Or: or “How The New Edition of This Book Beloved By Knitters, Came About….” Today I thought I’d give an insight into how we put together the new edition of “The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales”, that classic, much-loved book on the history of Yorkshire knitting… Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley produced six books together, […]
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WW1 Ancestors
I’m always compelled by genealogy when it put stories and faces to names. And it being 100 years since WWI, I wanted to write something in memory of my two great-uncles who died in that War. One of them was the reason I got into genealogy in the first place. I was going to keep […]
Today I’m re-visiting the subject of a recent blog post. Killingbeck, Leeds gent George Walker (1781-1856), toured Yorkshire in 1813-14, recording the clothing of the ordinary man and woman for his book, ‘Costume of Yorkshire’. Plate XXIII showed a teasel field, and was sketched/painted in the village where I grew up. Many of Walker’s […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 