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I'm so sorry to hear this sad news.

King's Head Hotel, 1898: source Sandwell Public Libraries as posted to Smethwick Facebook group. Some talk of Wetherspoon's occupying the building. Fine bay windows in this old photo taken before the pub was extended.

That's more like a dolls' house! So it was simply on loan. I must have seen it, but I have no recollection. Probably distracted by swords and cannon balls!

Mother of Pearl Model of Aston Hall, Birmingham, Late 19th Century. I found this image on an internet auction site, listed at £34,000 but 'unavailable'. I wonder if it was simply on loan to Aston Hall? Possibly it was restored in 2015?? Sad that so much of Birmingham history is lost to us...

The Ringway Centre recently from Cafe Nero in the Bull Ring Centre. 'DUST' put his tag on the end near the roof which seems to symbolise the building's fate. As a child I imagined that the Ringway and Rotunda would be a new exciting Birmingham, but now the Rotunda is in need of renovation and...

I've never seen such mapping or annotation. Back to Backs were built all over the city and as @brummy-lad said were occupied in some cases into the 1960s. Janice Heppenstall has a useful post on her blog https://englishancestors.blog/tag/birmingham-back-to-backs-museum/ Looking at addresses...

Birmingham Daily Mail 4 September 1906 [British Newspaper Archive] Well before the celebrated Birmingham Surrealists. Nothing that I could find in the Birmingham papers about the creation of the mosaic. How fortunate that they and the fireplace were not destroyed. The Kardomah dates from 1906...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/videos/c6290xdy6k9o A Taste of Britain: The Heart of England, originally broadcast on BBC One. August 1975. A very old-fashioned method of production for the mid-70s. Inside Worcester Museum there's a preserved chemist's shop with many bottles of sauce. Lea and Perrins is...

I agree Tinpot, we visited Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery a few years ago to discover that they had an amazing natural history collection, including many stuffed birds. The Natural History Museum at Tring has an extraordinary collection if anyone is mobile.

If you have the author's name then both the British Library catalogue and the Bodleian Library catalogue are on-line. The copyright libraries hold a copy of almost all books published in the UK and many other places as well. If you share his name, then I'm happy to look for you.

@gemma I've looked at the registers of Napoleonic POWs on Find My Past and can't find him, I'm afraid. These are alphabetical and hand written in ink. Some of the names are out of order, but they do contain civilians as well as seamen and soldiers. I think given the large numbers of other ranks...

A shout out for Jez Collins's Birmingham Music Archive which celebrates the popular music of all genres of Birmingham. https://birminghammusicarchive.com/index.php/about-bma/

True - but not the end of the story. Boney was exiled on Elba in 1814, but he escaped in February 1815 and reassumed control of France for around one hundred days.He was finally defeated at the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and this time exiled to the more inaccessible island of St Helena...

Gemma, you say in your first post: Every prisoner was released in 1814 at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon was hostile to prisoner exchanges or early release as he thought that this would simply free men to attack France.

Besides soldiers or sailors, merchant seamen and civilians were detained as prisoners of war. Officers and 'gentleman travellers' on both sides might be paroled, but the common men had a tougher time of it. J. David Markham describes their lot in the final paragraph of his paper...

Thanks Gemma, we will see what we can find. Good luck! Stokkie

The French Revolutionary Wars lasted from 1792 until 1802. There's a short peace, then the Napoleonic Wars https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/napoleonic-wars-timeline/. So yes, your ancestor would be a soldier or a sailor if he was a prisoner of war in 1810. In that year the French...

George Whitefield preaching. [Wikipedia no restrictions] Selina, Countess of Huntingdon was his patron. Their brand of Calvinist Methodism focussed on personal revelation, Bible reading and preaching and religious conversion. The pulpit rather than the altar being the focal point perhaps...

William Shenstone (1714- 1763) was a poet, but is now chiefly remembered for his Landscape Architecture, he created Leasowes Park https://theleasowes.co.uk which can be visited for free and which many of us may remember as 'Bluebell Dell' from our childhood. The Leasowes has been restored in...

Thanks Warren. Monzo was accepted by my bank without any issues. Thanks for keeping us going.