ENG-GLOS-FOREST-DEAN-L Archives

From: "Lee Paltridge" <>
Subject: [FoD] Newnham Transcripts - Mysteries solved
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 18:13:10 +0800

- Original Message -
From: David Watkins <>
Subject: [ENG-GLOS-FOREST-DEAN] Forest of Dean Parish Records -
AugustAdditions
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 20:33:40 +0800

Forest of Dean Parish Records Project
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/?Parish_Records_Project

Parish Records added on the Web site in August 2006 ...<<<


Hello David

This is a huge thank you to you and your team. I followed your posting to
the Parish Records site which I had already joined a while back. Wow!!! I
thought I would never find the details of my Newnham family - someone had
told me years ago that there were no BOWYER baptisms on the post 1812 fiche,
and it has not been filmed by the LDS, so I had resigned myself to having
incomplete pages. And here they all are. I had been told of most of the
burials by a kind lister who had access to a local burial index, and had
worked back on ages from those, but now I have their pages complete. Years
of mysteries and puzzles solved in one afternoon.

There are all sorts of finds. So exciting. I had been baffled by the fact
that my great great grandmother Mary BOWYER on her marriage to John CLARK in
Bristol in 1840, described her father BOWYER as Shoe maker. All directories
and censuses from 1837 onwards show him as a beer seller or innkeeper in
Newnham. On her own baptism across the river in Arlingham in 1814, he was
described as a 'Serjeant' - Waterloo???, but now these Newnham baptisms from
1816 onwards show him as a cordwainer/shoemaker. Mystery solved. Mary and
John CLARK lived in Montpelier in Bristol and I knew their first son had
died between 1842 and 1851. Surprise surprise. There is his burial - John
Price Bowyer CLARK in Newnham in 1845. Another mystery solved. I also
discovered a new daughter for James and Sarah BOWYER - Emma in 1829, her
marriage in 1849, the birth and burial of her son in 1849, aged three days,
and her own burial aged 22 in 1851. All new.

What sad lives they had. William BOWYER and Mary PRICE/PREECE m 1796 had
eight children of whom only two surivived to adulthood, and their oldest son
James BOWYER and Sarah ROWLES m 1813 also had eight, of whom again only two
survived to have children of their own.

If any listers haven't yet registered and joined this site, you could be in
for a real treat.

Lee
Perth, Western Australia.

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• [FoD] Newnham Transcripts - Mysteries solved by "Lee Paltridge" <>