General

As many people by now will be aware, public interest in family history has increased greatly over the past decade. Genealogy can be a discipline with an almost forensic dimension to it, yet unravelling the complexities of one’s family tree is not an exact science or an easy task. It can lead up many blind alleys or to dead ends. Apart from contingencies such as absent, incomplete – or illegible – parish records there is one very significant pitfall, which the beginner just setting out is unlikely to be aware of.

There is something peculiarly unique about the year 1751 – it was only nine months and seven days long. Strange as it seems, New Years Day has not always been on January 1st. In fact from 1190 to 1752 the New Year began not on January 1st but on March the 25th! From 1190 to 1752 England was using the Julian Calendar devised by Julius Caesar, which was set to run from March 25th (Lady Day) to the last day of the year, the following March 24th. In this calendar the tropical year is approximately 365.25 days, making an error of 1 day in 128 years.

Under an edict issued by the Council of Trent Pope Gregory XIII addressed this error by reforming the Julian Calendar so that the tropical year equalled 365+ 97/400 days or 365.2425 days. The new system named after him also meant that it took 3,300 years for the tropical year to shift a day with respect to the Gregorian Calendar. However, in 1752 Lord Chesterfield passed a bill in Parliament enacting the change over to Pope Gregory’s calendar, which ever since would logically set the first day of each year at January 1st. Since 1752 had to begin on this day, 1751 ended on December 31st – not the following March 24th!

What then are the implications of this change for genealogical or title research? It means that any date from the 1st of January to the 25th of March before 1751 has to have another year added to it. For example, the 11th of January, 9th of February or 23rd of March 1780 would actually be in 1751 for today’s purposes under Gregorian system. Before 1752 the progression of any year’s months commenced in March, so the 29th of April in 1709 would actually be June 29th 1709, not April 29th.

Again, if a document gives a date in any year prior to 1752 written as the ninth day of the tenth month 1736, the month should be reckoned as starting in March, so in this example the month is not (today’s) October, but the December of that time when the document was written. At this point it may be pertinent to remind ourselves that the name “December” (meaning the tenth month) is a hangover from the time when it was just that under the more attenuated Julian Calendar.

Now suppose that a family member or genealogical researcher wants to find the date of baptism, marriages or burial of a Dorset ancestor in a parish register (though this would apply to anywhere else in the country). From what as gone before there is clearly no need for any conversion calculation if the date in question is after 1752 as both past and present are Gregorian and are therefore “in sync”. However, any date before Lord Chesterfield’s parliamentary act of that year which adopted the Gregorian Calendar will not be “in sync” with the present. If a parish register entry for the right person sought indicates that he or she was born on, for example, February the 5th 1649, then to conform to the Gregorian Calendar one year must be added, making the revised date February the 5th 1650.

On the continent and some other countries the further back in time one could go before conversion from the old to the new calendars becomes necessary would be that much greater, since beyond these shores use of the Julian Calendar was abandoned during the latter 16th century. Since family documents dating from before this period are likely to be rare or non-existent the Julian-Gregorian anomaly is a problem mostly confined to British genealogical research.

Since 1752 a number of improvements in the methods and efficiency of record keeping and conservation have inevitably been made. In 1801 the ten-yearly population census was begun in England and Wales, though until 1841 names were not collected, and that year’s census results were unreliable or, because they were only recorded in pencil, often illegible. For the 1851 census another seven pieces of information were required, and further improvements followed in 1891. In 1837 civil registration began in England and Wales, although it did not become a legal requirement until 1874. Since 1538 the Church of England had compiled parish registers, though few of the earliest of these records have survived. However, these records are very uncomprehensive, as they only record church responsibilities, i.e. the baptisms (not births), marriages, and burials (not deaths) of parish natives. Before 1538 there was no official system for recording the events in people’s lives.

It can be seen then that conversion from a written date to the Gregorian date will be necessary for parish records before 1752, but would not concern any national census dates.

For over fifty years people have been seeing things in the skies over Britain, many of them in southern England. Popularly known as UFO’s these sightings seem to be outside the realm of our familiar terrestrial aircraft of whatever kind.

Dorset’s Moigns Down is one such area, an ideal spot for a fine Sunday afternoon’s stroll in the country. Certainly Mr J.B. Brooks, a local of this area between Dorchester and Wareham considered it so. He regularly walked his two dogs over the Down on fine days, probably with no thought in his head regarding ancient legends concerning the area, or of its history.

And nothing seemed out of the ordinary when, on the morning of the 26th of October 1987, Brooks left home as usual to exercise his dogs on the chalk hill. By about 11.25 however, high winds which were prevailing that morning had accelerated into a force 8 gale, forcing the walker to shelter up in a timely and conveniently placed ditch or hollow in the ground. Here Mr Brooks rested up, gazing skyward and waiting for the wind to abate so he could resume his walk.

Suddenly into his view intruded an airborne object the like of which Brooks had never before seen or could have imagined. The thing took the form of a small disc or hub, from which a fuselage-like girder or antenna extended forwards, while another three identical projections aligned parallel to each other extended backwards on the other side. But the observer barely had time to comprehend what he was seeing before the next thing happened. In an instant the four girder-arms extending from the disc were seen to separate from one another, forming an equi-dimensional cross, which then began rotating around the central axis.

In his later report of the incident Brooks estimates that the revolving, but stationery object remained in view for about 22 minutes before the extended arms closed up again and the strange, unearthly device left the area of the hill at phenomenal speed.

At this point it is temping to think that the walker out exercising his dogs genuinely bore witness to some sophisticated surveying or reconnaissance devise possibly under the control of an advanced alien intelligence. Certainly from the description of its appearance and modus operandi, the UFO (if that’s what it was) displayed a technological level at least a few decades ahead of our own, for the hub around which the arms rotated appears to have been no more than a few feet across. Yet it was large enough to incorporate a drive mechanism capable of hovering, revolving and accelerating away at very high speed.

While UFOlogists may well favour the alien/space theory, other sceptical experts had an altogether more anthropocentric explanation for the sighting. For instance, it emerged that Mr Brooks had recently undergone a cornea transplant. Debunkers of the space/alien hypothesis ruefully considered the possibility that what Brooks actually saw was a ‘floater’ just a detached piece of skin on his eyeball! It is not known whether the proponents of this medical solution to the mystery were ever asked to explain how a floater was apparently able to unfurl itself and stay revolving for over twenty minutes.

This rather fanciful line of reasoning however is far removed from other technocratic considerations, which could shed some light on the enigma. Moigns Down occupies an area not far to the west of one of the most intensively used military ranges in the country, as well as lying not far west of the Atomic Research Establishment on Winfrith Heath. And it may be significant that in its extended form the Moigns UFO would have been comparable to a helicopter’s main rotor without the helicopter. Could Brooks then, have seen just the rotor of an army helicopter otherwise obscured by a cloudbank, its sound equally drowned out by the gale?

The Moigns incident, however, is not the only recorded sighting in Dorset of an object that does not fit the conventional UFO stereotypes of fiery or glowing – or pulsating – discs, cones spheres or triangles. Thirty-two years later on August 12th 1999 Brian Jones was looking seaward while attending an open-air event near Weymouth when he saw what he likened to a very odd microlite. The object was described as being oblong but with rounded ends and of a dense, dark colour. From the underside Mr James could see that something was suspended. As he was fortuitously carrying a camcorder at the time, he was able to video the object moving slowly on a course north-west towards Bridport, following the line of Chesil Bank while framed against the setting sun. The object did not descend, maintaining a height of approximately a kilometre before disappearing from view after about five minutes.

However, the resolution of the image on Brian James’ video was less than sharp, owing to the lack of available light, although the lens was at maximum zoom. The video footage therefore, was too indistinct for any positive identification to be made, even when shown on local TV news. It was thought the object may have been a parachutist, yet there was no aircraft in the area at the time from which a parachutist could have jumped. Also the fuselage and motor of a normal microlite could not be identified. Neither was any sound heard to come from the object, though the PA system of the nearby function James was attending could have drowned this out. The canopy was the wrong shape for a normal paraglider and furthermore there was no high ground in the vicinity to launch one from other than the risky outcrops of Portland.

The only possible man-made explanation tendered is that Brian James probably saw a powered paraglider, but one with the pilot wearing the motor and propeller as a backpack. But aside from these two unusual cases, there are significantly more which fall more easily into the conventional UFO mould. Six interesting sightings to occur in Dorset can be noted here.

One witness, Jim Horbury, was in Bournemouth on the 2nd of March 2001, when at 2 p.m. he sighted a large slow-moving triangular craft bearing bright lights but making no sound as it crossed the sky at approximately 100 feet. The object was afterwards described as “very frightening.” Then on the 2nd of May 2003, “two orange orbs” were seen to descend rapidly in a double helix formation “as if intelligently interacting with each other” over Bournemouth University. Two sauce-shaped gold-coloured craft were seen to swiftly and silently cross the sky over Parkestone, Poole at 10.15 p.m. on August 9th, 2001.

A flying triangle approximately 100 feet long with blue lights down its left side, red lights down is right. And a pulsating circular light changing colour in the centre was logged at Lyme Regis (10.55 p.m.) Portland (11 p.m.) and at Hengistbury Head (11.05 p.m.) on February 28th, 2002, after having first been sighted in Cornwall. At Winterborne Stickland a 9-year-old boy playing football around 8.20 p.m. one day in August 1991 saw “a large silver disc with a raised centre and red and yellow lights around it” tilt 45 degrees and then head earthwards. A man driving his girlfriend home through Broadmayne at midnight on July 28th, 2002 saw a phosphorescent cone-shaped green light silently and rapidly shoot across the sky.

Had you been able, 140 million years ago, to stand where Studland, Worth Matravers or anywhere else in Purpeck now are, your surroundings would have been as terrifying as they were breathtakingly primeval. You would have been thrown back to the age of the Dinosaurs, but at a point approximately half-way along in their reign on earth, with almost as long again before the catastrophe in which they perished.

By the end of the much-publicised Jurassic period, south east Dorset was covered by a swampy lake in which the sediments now forming the Purbeck beds were deposited. Here the water margin was frequented by the great reptiles of the day, who left their multi-ton imprints in the soft mud, a substratum which periodically dried out, setting footfalls in what today is the solid rock of the Purbeck cliffs and promontories.

Because of this unfortunate accident of nature in remote antiquity, Purbeck today is not just the centre of a long tradition of aggregate extraction. The course of nature has made it simply one of the world’s premier dinosaur sites. It is a treasure house of prehistory, but one more noted for the traces of these monsters than for their bones. The Purbeck hills have yielded more sets of saurian footprints than any other area of Britain. And the bones which have been found – usually washed up by the sea – hint powerfully at the presence of a dinosaur graveyard somewhere beneath Swanage Bay.

Through excavation and quarrying activity however, it has become apparent that one formation above all others has preserved the great majority of the saurian traces discovered in the Purbeck Series. This is a scorious, pink sandy limestone packed with casts of numerous spire-shelled snails, called the Roach (or Pink) Bed. This bed lies only a few feet below the surface and is fissured horizontally and vertically. In 1962 Geologist J.B. Delair had noted the high frequency of reptilian prints in this bed, but such traces from any other Purbeck beds would not be proved until 1965.

Delair noted that the prints occurred along the bedding. Other clues suggested the saurians were in shallow water just deep enough to keep their tails buoyed up as they waded in deeper, for there are sets of tracks starting well-defined, but which become less distinct with immersion.

In all instances the prints show action: the reptiles were not simply standing or grazing passively. Some appeared to be running or changing direction. Six-inch prints exposed in a quarry near Acton have been attributed to a creature named Purbeckopus pentactylus . Two prints facing away from each other at 90 degrees were discovered in 1936 and another set forming an almost complete circle on the rock bed has also been found.

Delair noted, in a quarry between Worth Matravers and Acton, prints orientated in all directions around a saucer-like depression on a bedding plane. Although several dozen saurian prints in all have been found in Purbeck, barely a handful has been saved for posterity, and most of these have been erased or partly obscured by weather conditions. In 1961 at Herston a fine set of double tracks saw the light of day when E.W. Shuttle re-opened Mutton Hole Quarry. There were 26 prints, and a further trail was discovered here in 1962 which attracted much more attention from the scientific community. The prints were interpreted as those of a Megalosaurus, but no attempt was made to preserve them. The Natural History Unit of the British Museum excavated a further 70 prints from an undamaged section at Mutton Hole.

A quarry at Queensground, Lytchett Matravers, revealed prints of Tri-dactyls, one of which came not from the Roach Bed but a freestone bed four feet lower. This made it the first saurian footprint ever to be found in a bed other than Roach.

Upon the great extinction and geographical change which ushered in the Tertiary era, the dinosaur remains were engulfed in torrents of water bearing sediments which buried their carcasses and traces. But Purbeck’s fossil record bears witness to the next great evolutionary leap – the emergence of the mammals.  One of the earliest deposits of mammalian remains is in the cliffs at Durlston Bay. The remains are disarticulated bones and teeth of some of the earliest marsupials, heralding the scion of evolution that, 50 million years later, would result in the appearance of ourselves.