Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic Asylums: a Guide for Family Historians, Michelle Higgs, Pen and Sword, 2019,  196p, £14-99. ISBN 978 1 52674 485 2 My great-great-grandmother Emma Wood’s brother, Theophilus Wood, died in the Warwickshire Lunatic Asylum in 1871. It was his extraordinary fore-name that initially attracted my attention...

Tracing Your Family History with the Whole Family: A Family Research Adventure for All Ages, Robin C. McConnell, Pen and Sword, 2022, 151p, £14.99. ISBN 9781399013888. This is a very well-intentioned book, based on the exceptionally strong idea of inter-generational collaboration. Robin McConnell is very persuasive in his proposition that...

Tracing Your Poor Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians, Stuart A. Raymond, Pen and Sword, 2020, 196p, £14-99. ISBN 9781526742933 This is a very helpful aide memoire for anyone wishing to find out what their impoverished ancestors may have experienced. Inevitably it cannot provide precise answers to the most specific...

Tracing Your Prisoner Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians, Stephen Wade, Pen and Sword, 2020, 176p, £14-99. ISBN 9781526778529 This is part of a very helpful series that has been produced by Pen and Sword. In this volume Stephen Wade guides us into a potentially unfamiliar area of family and...

Travellers in the Third Reich. The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People, Julia Boyd. London: Elliott and Thompson Limited, 2017, 488 pp., ISBN 978 1 78396 381 2, £10.99 A well-written and interesting account that reflects not only a wideranging trawl through a range of sources but...

Uncommon Courage: The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II, Julia Jones, Adlard Coles, 2022, 310p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4729-87105 Historians are frequently obsessed with defining what constitutes a primary source, a source which will be guaranteed to yield reliable data. What Julia Jones has done is to produce a book which...

Understanding the British Empire by Ronald Hyam(Cambridge University Press), 2010 552pp., £24.99 paper, ISBN 0-978-521-13290-9Ronald Hyam is a highly regarded imperial historian whose work over the last thirty years has been at the forefront of innovative thinking about the subject.  Divided into six main themes, the geopolitical and economic dynamics...

Victorian Stained Glass, Trevor Yorke, Shire Publications, 20222, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1-78442-483-1 This is an extraordinarily helpful introduction to the art and manufacture of stained glass. Its extra attraction is that it offers much more than the title suggests. Trevor Yorke provides a very succinct but clear explanation of the...

Voices of the Flemish Waffen-SS, Jonathan Trigg, Amberley, 2017, 256p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4456-6636-5  The subtitle of Jonathan Trigg’s book is ‘The Final Testament of the Oostfronters’ and this very aptly guides us to his purpose in researching this topic. Given the unsettling knowledge that Belgian and Dutch nationals fought within...

Volunteers and Pressed Men. How Britain and its Empire Raised Its Forces in Two World Wars, Roger Broad, Fonthill, 2016, hardback, 206 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781781553961 This volume focuses specifically upon recruitment for the two World Wars of the twentieth century, which will enable students to readily compare and contrast...

War Bows, Mike Loades, Osprey Publishing, 2019, 312p, £30-00. ISBN 978-1-4728-2553-7. This is a highly technical book. Mike Loades examines in exceptional detail four types of ‘war bow’ – the longbow, the crossbow, the composite bow and the Japanese ‘yumi’, used by the samurai. This is an extraordinarily well-illustrated scholarly...

Warfare, Raiding and Defence in Early Medieval Britain, by Erik Grigg, Marlborough: Robert Hale, 2018, 224 pp., £25; ISBN 978 0 7198 26788. A sophisticated analysis of defence in early-medieval Britain that focuses on the widespread building of early-modern dykes in order to thwart the raids that were an incessant...

Wealth and Disaster: Atlantic Migrations from a Pyrenean Town in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, John Hopkins University Press, 2016, 230pp., $45 hard, ISBN 978-1-4214-2128-5. In 1729, Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor French nobleman, set sail for Saint-Domingue. Twenty years later, peasant Jean Mouscardy also made the long and difficult journey to Saint-Domingue. Although...

Welfare in Widecombe 1700-1900: An illustrated journey through local archives, Roger Claxton, Widecombe History Group, 2019, 194p, £17-00 [plus postage and packing], ISBN 978-1-9162849-0-6. More details from www.widecombe-in-the-moor.com/welfare/ Meticulous research has enabled Roger Claxton to produce his Welfare in Widecombe 1700-1900, with its longer and highly significant title of an...

Wingfield: Suffolk’s Forgotten Castle, Elaine Murphy, Poppyland Publishing, 2021, 396pp., £19.95. ISBN 978-1-909796-88-1.  Grade 1 listed Wingfield Manor, ancestral home of the Wingfield family was inherited by Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, in 1385, less than four weeks after his marriage to Katherine Wingfield, sole heir of her...

Women and the Great Hunger, Christine Kinealy, Jason King and Ciaran Reilly, Cork University Press, 2017, paperback, 236 pp., £21.95, ISBN 97809909454  The seventeen editors and authors contributing to this groundbreaking study include some of the leading researchers in Irish studies, offering new scholarship, methodologies and perspectives on this immense...

Working-class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate, Paul Jennings, Palatine Books, 2022, 264p, £14.99. ISBN 978-1-910837-37-5. Instinctively most people would identify Harrogate in modern times as a rather well-built and prosperous tourist centre. Of course, it is more than that because the real impetus to its history was its emergence as a...

‘You are Legend’: The Welsh Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Graham Davies, Welsh Academic Press, 2018, 224p, £19-99. ISBN 978-1-86057-1305 ‘You are legend’ is a phrase from the farewell speech by La Pasionaria in 1938 when the International Brigade withdrew from the Spanish Civil War. Amongst the British contingent...