July has been a bit of a quieter month here at BH: a chance for a breather before the next onslaught of events.
On July 3rd the new Boundary stone was unveiled at the point where the four parishes of Bishopsteignton, Ideford, Chudleigh and Ashford meet: an unusual occurrence to have four parishes meeting at one point. Please see the last post in this section for more details.
Here at the HUB in the Wilson Room of the Community Centre, we have been joining various societies on behalf of the project.
The British Newspaper Archive,
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
Devon Family History
The Society of Genealogists
and Ancestry.co.uk
In time we shall be equipped for researchers to browse these sites at the HUB and contribute to the project with their research.
To date we have published over 70 posts on this website including the Scrapbook pages from the Village Festival project. These pages were produced by children from Bishopsteignton Primary School, and some adults. Each were asked to portray their thoughts on the village, past, present or future. The results are brilliant, look at them here:
https://www.bishopsteigntonheritage.co.uk/events/2019-heritage-scrapbooking-project/
or if you would prefer, please feel free to pop in to the Community Centre on a Tuesday or Friday from 10 until 2pm, and see the artefacts themselves. We have also published various articles on some of the very interesting properties in the area. Do take a look and see if you can add to the information on the site. All contributions are very welcome.
On May 8th 2020 we shall be celebrating the anniversary of V.E. Day. Here at BH we have already started planning a V.E. Day project. There will be several events going on in the village and BH will be part of that. One idea we are pursuing is to investigate the various evacuees that were billeted in Bishopsteignton during WWII. We have come across photos and letters from evacuees and their families in the archive, and are beginning to collect more information on these children and families. If anyone would like to help with that, or if you have your own ideas for the V.E. Day events, please get in touch.
One such evacuee was a lady called Phyllis Blogg and her sons. The family were staying with the Wards who ran the butcher’s shop in Fore St. at the time. After posting a photo of Mrs Blogg on our Facebook page, members of the Ward family came to visit us with more information, so that is turning into a nice future article subject. If you have any information on evacuees, please do get in touch.
We always welcome visitors and we were delighted to have several members of Clifford Wallis’s family arrive from Scotland and Kent a couple of weeks ago. They were very pleased to see what we were doing in Mr Wallis’s old school room. They have since been in touch with more information on the family. They are the son and daughter of Clifford Wallis’s grandson Noel Clifford Wallis.
We discovered we had lots of photos of the Wallises in the archive and have been able to share these with the family: yet another wonderful story to add to our collection.
If there is anyone out there who would like to help piece all this information together for an article on the website, please do get in touch and come to see us.
Soon we shall be ploughing ahead with our research into the veterans of WWII for the November Remembrance event. We have a wonderful photograph of the Bishopsteignton WWII Home Guard, and a list of names. If you have a relative that served in the Home Guard we would love to hear from you. Just email us at:
or call in and see us at the HUB.