Author: Penny Stokes
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Workers, widows, wives and wanderers: the women of Tudor Newbury
Women are often left out of recorded history, but their lives lie hidden in records, from where Joan Dils pieced together the lives of five Newbury women in Tudor times.
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The Great Road to Bath: did it lead to health or depravity?
In an age when gentlemen and ladies often neither dined together, or shared the same church pews, Bath’s communal facilities must have come as quite a shock for the first-time visitor. When Edward Ward visited the famous city he observed a startling and deeply unattractive picture of the middle classes taking to the waters.
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Berkshire and South Oxfordshire churches: hidden gems and stories
Where can you visit a private library within a church? Or see rare examples of the macabre funerary art which swept Europe after the Black Death? Or find graffiti recalling the incarceration of Levellers in 1649? Catherine Sampson reveals all.
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Heraldry: more than just logos for nobles
Heraldry can help with family history research, and there are many sources freely available online.
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The Victorian Plentys
At the Newbury Branch January 2020 meeting Ellie Thorne of the Berkshire Record Office outlined the history of the Plenty company, an innovative and successful engineering firm founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lifeboats, steam engines, boilers, pumps, diesel engines and even a delivery van were produced at Plenty’s Eagle Ironworks in the…
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March 2016
A rascal from Shinfield; what they say about family historians; stories from Newbury’s Newtown Road Cemetery; Hydes and their hidden faith; Endell Street Hospital; English Poor Law and a Canadian mystery; evacuated to Kintbury
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December 2015
Poachers in the dock; a quest for some publican ancestors; a Victorian school day; grandfathers in WWI; the Herridges, a Purley family; a Christmas quiz to test your knowledge of the royal county
