Forum Activity for @iamtimbo

Is this St. Mary RC Primary in Harborne?

Schools


This school photo postcard was recently offered for sale on eBay, and shows (according to the slate), St Mary's RC school, or a class from it.
The card was postmarked as being sent from Birmingham on November 23rd 1910 to Miss A Hales in Mountain Ash, Glamorgan. 
Currently, and as far as I can gather, there's only one St Mary's RC Primary in the Birmingham area, and that's on Vivian Road in Harborne, and it certainly would have been around in 1910.
One of the students is marked with an 'x' and I would assume it's a relation of the senders, who are signed as 'L + H'. I tracked down the postcard recipient in the 1911 census - it's an Agnes Hales, who was the head teacher of the school in Mountain Ash.
Her oldest sister was Lillian Hephzibah Hales, so it could be a relation of hers,  although I couldn't find any evidence of her having married an 'H' - and there aren't many Lillian Hephzibahs to choose from. 
There's not much distinctive in the photo (apart from the brickwork around the window and the wall itself) to say it is or isn't St Mary's Harborne. Perhaps you can help identify it? 
The Hales family themselves are from the Erdington area, and there don't appear to be any St Mary's RC schools in that locality.
updated by @iamtimbo: 17 Aug 2015 10:08:30

Image view counts and ratings

Updates

You will now see an image view count in the description box for each photo/image on Our Town Story, allowing you to se how many times it's been viewed.
Remember, you can also give a star rating to any pictures you particularly like - just click or tap on the number of stars you think it's worth. The average rating will be showed below the title of each picture, and under its thumbnail in the album view...
updated by @iamtimbo: 06 Jun 2015 11:41:03

Free Wimborne photo scanning

General

As we begin to build up Our Town Story, we've used a lot of images from English Heritage, as well as old postcards. What we really want to showcase, though, is the images that are hiding away from the history books - and that often happens because people don't have a scanner, or can't get the images into a computer.
We're concentrating on Wimborne to begin with - as I grew up here, I know it very well - its story really interests me, and I think if we can get Our Town Story right for Wimborne, we can get it right for other locations, too.
If you've got a collection of old Wimborne pictures that could be posted - whether they're negatives, prints or slides - for a limited time we will scan them and upload them to Our Town Story, completely free of charge. Each collection will be posted as an album, credited to yourself. We will add comments and captions from the photos, too, as well as dates (if known), and add them to the Wimborne map.
We will return, them, of course, along with a DVD of all the images, by the same method we received them.
If you can help, please drop us a line at ourtownstoryuk [at] gmail.com - please do contact us by email first! Obviously, there's a practical limit to the number we can scan, but get in touch and we'll see what we can do. We look forward to scanning your pictures! 
If you have any questions, please post them below, or on our Facebook page - www.facebook.com/OurTownStory
updated by @iamtimbo: 20 Jun 2015 14:34:04

Know the Flicks from their wedding picture?

People, Events & Entertainment



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
These two cards were offered for sale on eBay recently, and would seem to be of the recently married Mr & Mrs Flick, as they bear their names on the reverse. The cards were apparently embossed with the name of a Wimborne photographer (not sure which one), so could well have been taken locally.
Can you shed any light the Flicks, or the house in the photo...?
updated by @iamtimbo: 23 Jul 2015 08:09:46

Slideshows for Places

Updates

When you view all the images for a given place, they will come from a variety of users' galleries. If you would like to just leaf through all the fullscreen images from a  specific place, just click 'View in Lightbox' in that specific town's 'Images' tab.
You'll be able to see the captions underneath each image to see what the original poster had to say about it....
updated by @iamtimbo: 21 May 2015 17:59:50

Last train into Wimborne Station

Transport

This video, taken in 1977, shows the last passenger train into Wimborne Station. Called the Corkscrew Shuttle, it was a special charter....

I find it amazing that there were trains in my lifetime, yet other than an abandoned station, and then later playing around on the embankment where the new houses are and finding the old signalling rods, I have no recollection of an actual moving train in Wimborne...
updated by @iamtimbo: 23 Jul 2015 08:10:26

Are there really no number 13s in Wimborne?

General

In a 1920s Ward Lock Red Guide for Bournemouth that I have, the entry for Wimborne closes with:
In a place where there is such an air of the past, it is not surprising that superstition should linger, although one would hardly expect any form of it to have official recognition. 
Yet to gratify the popular prejudice, the authorities, when assigning numbers to the houses, preparatory to the census of 1911, omitted the number 13, so that throughout the town, with one exception which escaped notice, the numbers affixed to the doors ran from 12 to 14.
Is this really true - and how much of Wimborne was affected? Do they still do it? I've heard a few stories over the years, but this one was new to me when I got the book. 
Can anyone elaborate?

updated by @iamtimbo: 23 Jul 2015 08:11:16

Near Me - a new way to find profiles and pictures near you...

Updates

We've introduced a beta version of 'Near Me' - a page that uses the IP address of the device you're using to gain your approximate location, and display the nearest place profiles and images to your current location.
This system will not work if you are accessing Our Town Story via mobile internet services, as IP addresses in this situation are not assigned geographically.
Obviously at this early stage, with relatively few images on the site, the image search may well draw a blank, but it should improve over time as more images are added.
Without driving all over the country, it's very hard to test how well this works, so we'd appreciate your feedback below, as to how accurate you find the system. The IP location database is not something we can improve, so if it's consistently wildly inaccurate, we may have to shelve the feature for the time being. If you could let us know roughly where you are, and where it thought you were, that would be very helpful.
You can find 'Near Me' at http://OurTownStory.co.uk/nearme - or from the 'Home' dropdown menu.
updated by @iamtimbo: 23 Apr 2015 18:10:38

Gallery Image Pages Layout Update

Updates

We've smartened up the layout of the image pages - like a lot of the aesthetics of the site, there's a way to go yet, but they're now a bit cleaner, and don't run down the page (quite) as far as they did. If the copyright field has been filled in, it will now appear at the end of the image description.
Remember, to add the details for an image - such as the title, description, copyright and location - click the cog icon above the image if you're in the detail view, or hover (or tap) the thumbnail of it in the gallery view, and then click the cog.
When you're filling out the details, you'll see that the 'category' options are now easier to select from. At the moment, these don't 'do' anything, but you'll soon be able to sort images by category.
If set in the right place, the Google Maps window should be one of the best features of the site - users are able to drag the orange 'pegman' to the marker and see a Streetview of the location as it is today.
updated by @iamtimbo: 23 Apr 2015 00:40:10

Welcome to WimborneReccers!

General

A warm welcome to anyone that's ended up here having visited WimborneRec. It was that site that inspired Our Town Story to come into being. Partly, it would have had to change anyway - the platform it was built on was proving to be too unreliable - and it was also costing a small fortune to run. 
Some interest was expressed, though, by other people in other locations in the concept of the site, and upon undertaking some research, it was clear that a national site with local detail just didn't exist. We also came across people using old photos in reminiscence therapy with dementia patients, and it seemed a small step to create a not-for-profit company to provide a place to post people's pictures and use the profits to help those who needed it.
We always said that WimborneRec would be free, so if you were a WimborneRec user (or you're in the first 100 to register anyway), you will have free lifetime membership of Our Town Story, and you'll be able to not only nosey at old Wimborne photos, but those from all around the country, too.
All the best,
Tim
updated by @iamtimbo: 14 May 2015 16:16:36