The Story of Croscombe

I have been trying to find a copy of 'The Story of Croscombe' by Keith Armstrong for some time now, but it has been out of print. But a second edition is now available. I stumbled across it on a recent trip back to the UK when I popped into the Shepton Mallet Tourist Information and Heritage Centre. The book is 256 pages in softback and covers the history of the village from pre-history to the 20th century. It is self-published by Keith Armstrong and available at The George Inn, Croscombe.

I was pleased to find a picture of my grandfather in there, boarding a bus for a day out at Weston with a group of quarry workers. There is a another photo of this group in a book of old photographs of Shepton Mallet, but in a different pose. I guess it must have been quite an event back then in 1919.

Carnival of Genealogy, #22

Issue 22 of the Carnival of Genealogy has just been published and Jasia was kind enough to include my post about Google Books. There are lots of other great posts there, so be sure to check it out. The one I particularly like is the one about Surname search, a tool for checking the geographical distribution of a surname in Great Britain. I could probably play with that for days!

Google Books as a research tool

Google Books is a project that scans books, indexes them and makes them available on-line. The amount of material you can read online depends on the status of the book, but most that are out of copyright are fully readable. You can choose to search either 'All Books' or 'Full View Books'.

I tried a search for 'Croscombe'. There are a lot of reports from religious periodicals such as The Baptist Magazine; reports of births, deaths and marriages in The Gentlemans Magazine; and a whole lot more. Reports on Epidemic Cholera cites Croscombe as one of the the 35 locations to have suffered much higher mortality than the average during the epedemic of 1848-1849, while
The Book of English Rivers describes briefly the river that flows through the village.

Leave a comment if you find anything interesting in Google Books.