About the Sources

As this project started as a dissertation, I was trying very hard not to include any information that was not verifiable, so I wouldn't use (for example) Wikipedia or another web site without following up the references it claimed to be using. The more contemporary the source, the more likely I was to quote it, but this does not mean that everything is correct: we all know that newspapers can get things wrong. Sources, even contemporary ones, could conflict and therefore confuse. Ultimately, one must cite the source of any piece of information so that the reader can judge for themselves.

The sources I used are listed in the Bibliography.

Sources used for finding the houses

Estate agents' advertisements and particulars

In the Hampshire Record Office there is a card index (finding number 159M88) of cuttings from Country Life and other periodicals, made by a Harrods employee. They cover the years 1913 to 1955 and each card is devoted to one property in Hampshire. Usually the cuttings are estate agents' advertisements or details of actual sales. This was where I started, and it had the disadvantage of giving me a lot of data for around 250 houses. Clearly that was far too many and I had to narrow them down. I did this by eliminating:

1. Houses smaller than 7 bedrooms
2. Houses outside the perambulation of the New Forest
3. Houses built after 1920

This left me with about 45 houses. As a starting point this was very good, but as a source it had two other disadvantages: not all the houses large enough or in the right area and period had come on the market during that time; and the details themselves might be out of date: the house might have been extended or even rebuilt before being advertised.

Of course earlier advertisements and sales particulars (at the NFRL and elsewhere) have also provided useful information about the houses.

Maps

To add to my list of known houses, therefore, I visually scoured the OS County Series 1:25000 maps of the 1860s to 1910s. I was privileged to be able to use EDiNA Digimap, a resource only available in UK Higher and Further Education. They are detailed enough to show the overall plan (or 'footprint') of the house and can show a house being extended or rebuilt from map to map. But the publication date of a map is not necessarily the date of the survey (so houses can pre-date a map) and a map may show a house before it is occupied.

Other sources

Further houses came to light during the process of finding information about the residents. I anticipate that, as I have now relaxed rule 2 (above), I will start to find more houses in the New Forest area, but outside the perambulation. It didn't matter much to the family in search of a house in the country whether it was inside or outside the perambulation, and it caused me to exclude some interesting houses.

Sources used for finding the residents

Directories

I know I could have started looking for houses in the trade directories, and if it hadn't been for 159M88, I probably would have done: it would have been more systematic. These were the 'phone books' of their day. They were not published every year and I think that Hampshire Record Office has all of them, giving us the 'private residents' of each settlement for the years 1859, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1878, 1885, 1889, 1895, 1898, 1899 (identical to 1898), 1903, 1905, 1907, 1915, 1920, and 1923. The NFRL has some of these as well.

Censuses

The censuses of 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, and 1911 dovetail nicely with the dates of the directories so that, if we are interested in the residents of houses in the 40 years between 1880 and 1920 we have 13 data points: not as good as every year, but on average we have data every four years. Turnover could be quite high, however, so we do not have exact dates for everyone's residence. In addition, of course, the houses could quite often be empty on census night, with the owners away at another house, up in London, or even on holiday abroad. I used FindMyPast for the censuses because, at least when I started in 2011, it was easier to find data by placename than it was in Ancestry.

In the Gazetteer any information from the censuses or directories is dated. So, for example, the statement 'in 1911...' refers to the 1911 census, and the statement 'in 1885...' refers to Kelly's Directory of that year.

Newspapers

This was a much more ad hoc source of information about residents, and their houses, because it's much easier to find someone or a specific house if they have an unusual name, and of course if someone did nothing of any note, they will not be mentioned in the newspapers (though one might hope at least for the publication of their estate if they were rich enough to own a house in the country!) Nevertheless I found many references in The Times Digital Archive, which is available via Hampshire Libraries membership, and in many local newspapers, which are now available on the FindMyPast site (although sadly not the Lymington Times).

Other primary sources

The most directly useful primary source proved to be NFRL N.750 LYN SC, Georgina Bowden-Smith, ‘Of what I remember of Lyndhurst and the neighbourhood nearly fifty years ago’, a typescript of the original ms, which was written in 1906, when Mrs Bowden-Smith (the widow of Richard Bowden-Smith of Lyndhurst) was 85. It mentions most of the important houses in Lyndhurst as well as some a little further away. Houses mentioned include: Vernalls (where the Bowden-Smiths lived), Brooklands, Linwood, Stydd House, Foxlease, Beechens, Wilverley, Cuffnells, Rosiere, Haskells, Hill House, Forest Bank, Queen's House, Elcombs, Northerwood, Glasshayes, Holmfield, Bench House, Holly Mount, Forest Lodge, Park Hill, The Cottage/Oakfield, Minstead Manor, The Orchard, Shrubbs Hill, Annesley, Carey's, Minstead Lodge, Bramshaw House, Woodlands, New Park, and Castle Malwood. By and large these are all, naturally, older houses: Mrs Bowden-Smith says nothing, for instance, about Sir William Harcourt's Malwood.