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Welcome to CAHS

Remembering a Local Soldier Earlier this year a telephone call came through to the Parish Office from an eighty-six year old lady presently living in Budleigh Salterton, Devon. The reason for the call was to check, in this special memorial year, that there would be the usual Remembrance Service around the War Memorial in Cirencester. Mrs. Wiltsher, the lady in question, went on to explain that her uncle, Percy Geyton, was listed on the memorial, and in this very special year she would like to pay her respects. She knew quite a lot about his family, his father was a wine merchant in Cricklade Street, and the family had lived for some time in the Mead. She thought that Uncle Percy had been an officer, and he was buried in the family grave in Chesterton Cemetery, but had little knowledge beyond that. The call was taken by Aileen Anderson, who is also the chairman of Cirencester Archaeological and Historical Society (CAHS), and she was able to tell Mrs. Wiltsher that the Society was researching information on all the names appearing on the memorial. Researchers, Linda Viner and Dale Hjort were able to discover that Percy had been a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Machine Gun Corps. Aileen also passed this information on to her friend, Christopher Fear, a member of the Western Front Association, who located the family grave, and placed a cross on it, as members of the Association do for all graves containing war dead. 2^nd Lieutenant Geyton had not died on the battlefield, in fact when Mrs. Wiltsher arrived to spend the Remembrance weekend in Cirencester, she brought with her a George V half penny which was dented, having stopped a bullet aimed at him. His parents must have been overjoyed when he returned home to Cirencester. However, their joy was not to last long, for a coin can sometimes stop a bullet, but it can’t stop gas. Percy’s lungs were destroyed, and he died on 29^th  July 1919 aged just 27 in the Memorial Hospital, Cirencester. He was buried on 2^nd August. His father arranged for his name to be inserted later on to the Memorial Plaque outside the Parish Church. We were able to take Mrs Wiltsher to visit the grave, which she is now arranging to be cleaned, and assure her that her uncle 2^nd Lieutenant Percy Geyton would continue to be remembered. This article by Aileen Anderson is taken from Cirencester Parish Magazine 2014 If you have any stories you would like us to tell please contact us  

Welcome to Cirencester Archaeological & Historical Society We are always happy to see new members. Do browse our site to see what we do. While our main activity is our meetings, we have other interests, such as our projects and the publishing of short articles in our Newsletters or even on line. Our major activity  this season was the WW1 Exhibition at Corinium Museum from 15 August to 14 September 2014,  See the WW1 blog News items will usually be on this page. Feel free to hover over and click any picture to see what happens. Our next meeting is on Wednesday 25th February, our annual joint Croome Lecture with the Civic Society. This year’s programme is available here .  

Commemorating The First World War 16th August – 14th September 2014 Corinium Museum, Park Street, Cirencester Cirencester Historical and Archaeological Society illustrated the impact of the First World War on Cirencester and residents through this retrospective exhibition. If you visited the exhibition or not, do keep on sending in your family notes if your family had Cirencester connections during that period. Don’t forget that there are other exhibitions on in town about WW1, The Timeline in the Parish Church runs until 2018.   A New Local Link has been added to the Living History Memorial Association, which concentrates on more recent history, but does have some World War 1 material

Cotswold Archaeology offers free e-books As part of its 25th anniversary, CA has made available a number of its publications that are now out of print for free download as photocopy pdf files. You can browse them, and paid-for publications on their website. The most notable might be “Cirencester- Town and Landscape”, 1994 by Tim Darvill & Chris Gerrard. Take a look at their 25 highlights while you are there. There are also job opportunities.