Granfer Henry Reads the News; Every Day Lives in Weymouth; 1884.

What I find fascinating about mooching through old newspapers is not only the sensational crimes and usual misdemeanours that fill the columns of the local papers, but also those mundane snippets that give us every day glimpses of our Victorian ancestors lives. In some sense, they really weren’t that much different from us. Take The…

19th c New Years Eve in ‘Dorset Lunatic Asylum.’

This New Year’s Eve musing takes on a slightly different tone. Maybe not quite so light a subject as I would normally cover, but it’s a subject that I feel strongly about and that I think often gets brushed under the carpet. (The words used, though not nowadays politically correct, are ones that were used during…

Misdemeanours and misfits in the Victorian courts; 1863.

I just love to browse the old newspapers and see what our ancestors were up to. The papers columns are filled with intriguing snippets of their daily lives, the usual hatch, match and dispatches, arrivals and departures, accidents and fights, and the misfortunes of those whose day to day activities managed to fall foul of…