Our next talk is this Sunday, March 31, when the title of Isabel Gordon’s talk is ‘Smallpox Across the Class Divide’.

Isabel Gordon is a good speaker and I’ve heard a bit of her talk before and it was fascinating. Lots of lives were affected by smallpox, even in Scotland, so your own family history might have been impacted, too. I suspect we’ll have a larger audience than usual, so come early to get a good seat. The talk is at St. Peter’s Church Hall, Parsonage Road, Galashiels, TD1 3HS (the front entrance is on Abbotsford Road). It’s very easy to get to, with some parking available in the grounds or on nearby roads, and there’s a very convenient bus stop – just ask for the St Peter's School (Galashiels) bus stop. Doors open at 2pm; the talk begins at 2.30pm.

We'll have a range of family history publications available to buy, and there’ll be light refreshments available after the talk. If you have a problem with your family history, please discuss it with one of our volunteers.

In last week’s article, I mentioned the new Berwickshire Place-Name Resource website but I didn’t have space to review it. The new website, berwickshire-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk, includes every Berwickshire place-name found on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, and can be searched in different ways. The home page offers several different tools but the main ones are Browse Place-Names, Element Glossary and Advanced Search. I suspect that for most people, the Browse Place-Names mechanism will be the most useful. It enables you to find a place-name alphabetically or on a map. Taking the evocatively-sounding name, ‘Friar’s Nose’, which is one of the sites to be explored by Chris Bowles’ archaeology project, ‘Whiteadder – the Historic Heart of the Lammermuirs’, what does the website tell us?

Clicking on Browse Place-Names takes me to an alphabet that shows how many records there are for each letter. A click on ‘F’ shows me a new page from which I can select ‘Friar’s Nose’. It also shows the parish name, map references and altitude. I can choose to view the record or show its location on a map. However, even the View Record button, displays a detailed map with the location, general information and there’s a button to see more details or to see historical forms of the name. ‘More details’ gives the etymology of the name which includes the fact that the ‘Nose’ element is a corruption of ‘Ness’. The historical forms have been Freris Neis, 1501; Frierneise, 1627; Freereniss or Freernise, 1654; Friers know rig, 1752 and Friar's Nose in 1862.

The Element Glossary shows the elements of place-names, their meaning and the place-names in which they occur. It can be searched by language (for example, Brittonic, French, Gaelic, Old English, Old Norse, Scots) for those interested in the origins of place-names. The Advanced Search is worth a look as it can be used to search by parish, feature, altitude, current place-name or place-name element. It’s a very interesting resource.

Peter Munro