PEMBROKE PEOPLE
IF you would like to immerse yourself in all the details of life in a late Georgian town and get to know nearly every inhabitant there, from the gentry down to the paupers and dregs of society, then you will want to read PEMBROKE PEOPLE. If your ancestors also came from West Wales or the Pembroke area or if you now live there, then you cannot fail to be fascinated by this book
 | WHO lived in Pembroke or Pembroke Dock nearly two hundred years ago? Where did they work? How much were they paid? Who were their neighbours? Did they have children and if so how many? Could they afford servants? Were they ever in debt or in trouble with the law? How did they live and die? Where and when were they christened, married and buried? What did they leave in their wills? PEMBROKE PEOPLE will tell you the answers. Which Pembroke man witnessed the Battle of the Nile? Who rode through the town on a velocipede? Who robbed McLaughlin the butcher and was he also murdered? What was the connection between cobblers and constables? Who was transported for stealing a bale of hay? And who established a great estate in Tasmania? Why was Bessy Roch so popular? What guilty secrets did the Collector of Customs confide to his diary? |
PEMBROKE PEOPLE will tell you everything. It is unlike any other book of local history. Family historians will be delighted by the multitude of names, dates, ages, and addresses it contains, with cross-references to help in tracing connections that might never be discovered by ordinary research. General readers and social historians will value its commentaries on society, morals, crime, money, medicine and all aspects of past life in West Wales. And residents of Pembroke and Pembroke Dock will discover unknown associations with familiar surroundings and view them with fresh eyes.
THE men and women who lived and worked in Pembroke and the newcomers who founded Pembroke Dock and the Dockyard in the early part of the 19th century are the subject of the book. It deals in unrivalled detail with the entire population of both towns, as named individuals, within a structure alphabetically arranged for easy reading and reference.
BY collating every entry in the parish registers for more than a generation, hundreds of family groups have been assembled, comprising thousands of persons who lived in the two towns between 1800 and 1837. More than seventy categories of trades and professions have been listed and, whenever possible, each family has been allocated to one of them according to the husband’s occupation. Domestic servants, where identified, have been added to the family groups. Paupers, vagrants and parents of illegitimate children, whose names appear in Parish and Poor Law Records are all covered. A section with more than nine hundred separate entries identifies the workers at the Dockyard, including all the officers, clerks, shipwrights and artisans and gives details of their origins, ages, families, wages and careers. PEMBROKE PEOPLE includes extracts, published for the first time, from the secret diary kept by Matthew Campbell, the Collector of Customs, which give a startling insight into low life in Pembroke in 1819. Every detail relating to Pembroke’s criminals in the Quarter Sessions and Great Sessions records from 1790 to 1830 has been noted and all wills of Pembroke residents proved at St David’s between 1770 and 1857 or in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury between 1800 and 1857 have been summarised in every particular. Gaol records, newspapers, vestry accounts, Poor Law records, Trinity House Petitions, Dockyard correspondence, trade directories, title deeds, bankruptcy papers, tradesmen’s ledgers, census returns and other sources have all yielded thousands of facts to expand what is known about the lives of those named in the book and in some cases carry their stories far into the 19th century. |
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PEMBROKE PEOPLE will be an indispensable companion for reading and reference to anyone connected with the Pembroke area. It is illustrated with contemporary line drawings, engravings and vignettes amongst the text and also includes a section of photographs and images, few of which have been previously published. A few extracts selected from thousands of entries and taken for variety from different parts of the book are printed below, giving some idea of how the material is presented and cross-referenced.
PEMBROKE PEOPLE is published by Otterquill Books in an edition intended primarily for Subscribers, who are offered the book at a considerable discount from the full retail price of £65. The format, typeface and layout are under discussion with the printers and the book is expected to be approximately 700 pages long, depending on the layout, and will be a substantial hardback volume of excellent quality in a coloured dust-jacket. The anticipated publication date is at the end of April 2000.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. The price to Subscribers is £52-75 (United Kingdom) or £60 (outside the United Kingdom) inclusive of postage and packing. Subscribers have the option of having their names printed in the List of Subscribers at the end of the book. Subscribers need pay no money now and the price will become due when the book is ready, at which time an invoice will be sent.
ENQUIRIES from Libraries, Institutions and the Book Trade are welcomed.
