Cotswolder Travel Guide

Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

Want to find an interesting branch of your family tree? Try searching on this new database of criminal records. Anyone involved with trials at the Old Bailey in London (England) between 1674 and 1913 is on this data base. The Old Bailey Online was launched this month and is already swamped with visitors (so the site may be slow). We heard about it on the BBC radio news.

I don’t know enough of my family tree to do any searching but I would love to hear from anyone who finds a relative in the database. They have a nice feature on the home page, “On this day in …”, where you can start diving into this interesting database, but each time I click it, nothing appears. We all need to wait a few weeks until they get their servers up to speed for all of us who will be searching.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote the novel “Cranford” (published in 1853), a comic picture of life in an English village in the mid 1800s. She wrote her novels just after Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) novels were written.

The first season of Cranford comes to PBS in North America in May (airing May 4, 11, and 18) in three episodes. From the PBS site: “Welcome to Cranford, circa 1840…a rural English town where etiquette rules, undergirded by a healthy amount of gossip. ” Staring: Judi Dench, Philip Glenister, Francesca Annis, Michael Gambon. Read more on the PBS site.

Cranford was filmed in the historic Wiltshire village Lacock, just north of Bath. We visited Lacock a few years ago.

The novel Cranford was adapted for TV by the BBC and shown in five parts at the end of last year in England. Read more on the BBC site. A second season will be shown on the BBC for Christmas 2009.

If you can’t wait, it is already on DVD - Cranford on DVD.

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We are working on creating our Cotswolder website, a travel guide for the Cotswolds in England. We plan to launch the site in June.

I will be posting weekly to this Cotswolder blog with posts about England, travel to England, the Cotswolds, or experience England when you are not there.

I moved my Views from the Slow Lane blog from slowtrav.com (my old website) to sloweurope.com (my new website). This blog focuses on European travel and European vacation rentals. Come and see us there: Views from the Slow Lane.