You have probably heard the phrase "Country House Libraries" and you may have noticed a few of these collections in National Trust Properties, writes JJ Heath-Caldwell.
A room full of tall bookcases, each with multiple shelves lined with old leather-bound books.
If we go back to Victorian times, there were thousands of private libraries located in country houses (and town houses) owned by upper class families who were lucky enough to be both rich and educated.
How were these libraries formed? What did they contain? What ultimately happened to them?
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The talk is in aid of Hampshire History Trust. (Image: Supplied) I was born and educated in New Zealand and came to the UK on a working holiday back in 1980.
My intention was to meet a few of my relatives, find out about some of my ancestors, gain the experience of a year "overseas" and then head back home.
One relative that I met up with was "Aunt Pat", an elderly spinster, who was my father’s sister.
She lived in a 200-year-old thatched cottage in a small village called Cattistock in Dorset.
I always remember my first visit. I received a very welcome hug on the doorstep and was then ushered inside.
The interior was very dark but as my eyes adjusted to the light I was amazed at what I saw around me. It was an Aladdin’s cave. I had never seen anything like it before in my life.
All the rooms were full of dark brown mahogany furniture and on the walls, there were numerous paintings, many of which were portraits of ancestors.
I was completely bowled over. Everything was 200 years old.
At the end of the house was a small room which my late grandfather had used as a study.
Along one wall was a set of bookshelves containing approximately 300 old leather-bound volumes.
The earliest was printed in 1587 (the time of Queen Elizabeth I).
Many of these old books had the names of the original owners written just inside the covers.
In some books there were inscriptions written in neat handwriting, but other volumes had printed bookplates with an elaborate family coat of arms and the name of the proud owner printed underneath.
Most of the books were printed but some were handwritten diaries, documenting the life of a person who had lived a long time ago, including a soldier by the name of Charles Crowe who had marched through Spain in 1812 fighting Napoleon’s army (luckily, he had lived to tell the tale!).
There were also piles of old documents and letters, many of them tied up with pink ribbon.
All sorts of old family relics were stuffed into draws and cupboards, and there were further boxes stored up in the attic.
What I didn’t know at the time, was that for me, this was going to be the beginning of a completely different journey to the one that I had originally set out on.
I could see that I was surrounded by information but what was it all about and how was it all connected? Who were these people who had lived way back in time?
Over the next few decades, step by step, I methodically started piecing the information together.
JJ Heath-Caldwell is giving the talk in Winchester. (Image: JJ Heath-Caldwell) The old family portraits proved to be a useful starting point as quite a few of them had family trees written on the back recording the name of the sitter together with the names of their parents, siblings, wife/husband and children etc.
In the early 1990s everything in our lives began to change as the internet kicked off.
This was initially quite daunting, but it quickly became apparent that this was going to bring about a massive alteration in how we related to the world.
In fact, now we would probably use the phrase "how we interconnect with the world".
The challenge back then was to figure out what the internet was going to become and how people would use it.
Search engine websites developed in the mid-1990s and within a few years Google had established itself as the first port of call from which to find other websites.
An early discovery that certainly caught my attention was the website abebooks.com which was a second-hand bookshop with a searchable list of titles and authors, taken from millions of volumes located in dealers’ bookshops all around the world.
I searched on an ancestor "Anne Marsh Caldwell". She had been an author back in the period 1830 to 1860 but I had never come across any examples of her works.
The results immediately popped up on my screen and I was amazed to find a few of her books that she had written but the real treasure was a book that contained her bookplate.
This was a volume from her library, owned by her and read by her.
For me it was an absolute gem, a book personally owned by my great-great-great-grandmother.
Wanting to find out more about the internet, my next step was to build a simple website.
One of my friends had put up a single page website with a few of her holiday photos.
I created a website with a page containing a list of the names of my various ancestors and relatives that I had identified at this stage.
I didn’t really think of this as a "Family History" website but that was what it evolved into.
From that time on, my interest in history took a major step forward.
The speed and ease in which obscure information could be identified and captured was truly amazing.
In fact, the more obscure it was, the easier it was to find it.
The other thing that happened was that people who I had never met started to contact me via the internet.
Many of these were historians who were also on their own journeys looking for information from which to produce a story about something that had caught their interest.
Over time, more old books turned up, passed down in other branches of the family or owned by dealers.
One of the major discoveries was an old exercise book which contained a list of all the books in the family library, written out by my grandfather back in the 1920s.
By now I realised that my interest had developed into a completely mad hobby.
The search for information had become a treasure hunt that gave me hours of pleasure.
Along the way I also met up with numerous distant relatives including one where we worked out that we were seventh cousins.
I was keen to write a book about it all, but I realised that a family history would only be of interest to a limited number of people.
A history of the library would be interesting, but it would really only be a long list of books.
Eventually I realised that the books, diaries, letters and the vast assortment of family relics, were really a window into the history of the British Empire, a history of civilisation and a history of the world.
One very useful spin-off from this was that I created a successful internet company localsurveyorsdirect.co.uk.
If you would like to hear more about JJ and his fascinating research, JJ is giving a talk at Adam Architecture, Hyde St, Winchester, on Thursday, June 5 at 6pm.
For details and tickets see hampshirehistorytrust.com.
This is a fundraising talk for Hampshire History Trust who organise the Heritage Open Days festival in Hampshire which, this year, is taking place from September 12 to September 21 with the theme of 'Architecture'.