25 February 2026

The websites I visited most often in Febry, for my own research

1. British Newspaper Archive
2. TNA
3. LoC (Images)
4. FreeReg
5. familysearch
6. East London FHS
7. London Gazette
8. BHoL
9. Cambs FHS
10. Ebay for Antiquarian Books

28 January 2026

The Parish Recorder

I’ve been browsing along my Nottinghamshire bookcase again, and today I want to pull down a favourite: In and About Nottinghamshire, published in 1908. Before I read you a little from it, let me introduce the man behind it.

Every so often in Nottinghamshire history you meet a figure who feels less like an entry in a directory and more like someone you might actually bump into on a village street. Robert Mellors is one of those. Picture him around 1905: a county alderman with a neat beard, a bundle of committee papers under one arm, and—always—a notebook ready to catch some scrap of parish lore before it slipped away.

He wasn’t an academic historian, and he never pretended to be. What he gave us was something more homely and, in its way, more precious: those parishbyparish rambles, the suburban sketches, the little biographies of Nottinghamshire worthies. He wrote like a man who genuinely wanted his neighbours to know where they lived. And people warmed to that.

But even in his own day, reviewers hinted gently at the limits of his approach. One in The Spectator praised his diligence but made it clear his big county book was an introduction, not the last word. And modern historians tend to agree. Mellors could gather stories, but he didn’t always interrogate them. He repeated local traditions with a straight face, offered placename guesses that make linguists wince, and sometimes wrapped his history in a civicimproving glow that smoothed out the rough edges.

Yet that’s exactly why he remains so useful. Mellors captured Nottinghamshire as Edwardians understood it—its memories, its pride, its sense of itself. When we read him now, we’re not just learning about the county; we’re learning how the county once told its own story.

And that set me thinking about the first time I went looking for my own parish stories. This must be forty years ago now. I’d gone to the village where my grandmother’s people lived around the turn of the nineteenth century. I don’t know why I’m shy about naming it—Great Bradley, on the Suffolk–Cambridgeshire border. I was poking around the church, hoping for a parish history, and found only a folded leaflet on the architecture. But a local pointed me to a homemade booklet by someone who called herself the Parish Recorder. She noted who came and went, which buildings fell down and which went up. It was exactly the sort of thing Mellors would have approved of. And it made me think: why don’t we all do that?

One postscript. Familyhistory wandering brings unexpected rewards. When we were examining the site of the old windmill, the farmer’s wife came out to see what we were up to. Hanging around is always a good way of making contacts. Just stand there long enough and someone will come and check you out. My wife admired her peonies, and the next thing we knew the farmer’s wife was digging up a few roots for us. Those flowers are still flourishing in our back garden today. You can see them from the conservatory door—living reminders of a village, a visit, and the stories that stay with you.