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This site is for WEB surfers who have an interest in the genealogy of the Sleeman family.

The links below will download data collected from the England & Wales Registers at the Family Records Centre in London, using Excel Spreadsheet (ver 4).  They will be expanded as I get time for research.

Use the map to help locate registration districts in Cornwall, Devon and Gloucestershire.

Also Maps for:  Penzance   Camborne, Falmouth & Truro  Bodmin & St Austell  Padstow & Wadebridge 

Liskeard, Plymouth & Tavistock  Launceston   Bideford & Holsworthy  Barnstaple   Okehampton   Tavistock

Forest of Dean

I've added some items of interest about members of the family I know, but there are many more of my generation from the Forest of Dean branch of the family with whom I have lost touch.  My Father was brought up in the "island" between Wales and England, cut off by the rivers Severn and Wye. He left there in his twenties and has lived in Coventry ever since.  We visited the  Forest regularly in the 1960s while his mum was alive, but since then my visits have been infrequent.

One book that contains some pictures of the Forest of Dean Sleeman family is "Highest Point of Dean" by Maurice V Bent (ISBN 0 9510752 0 9).

The life in the Forest from Victorian times until the outbreak of war in 1939 was very isolated from the "mainland".  A good book that describes this period was written by Winifred Foley "A Child in the Forest". She gives some insight into hard times and lack of jobs during the period that my father's generation were growing up.

The life since then has changed dramatically with the closure of the pits (coal mines) and the arrival of the car.  The television playwright Dennis Potter grew up on the edge of the Forest.  Perhaps his most evocative work is "The Changing Forest" (1962) [Published by Minerva - ISBN 0-7493-8643-6] where he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the new; habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis.

You may find his work disturbing or even offensive, but try "The Singing Detective" [on video - BBCV 54465/6] or "Blue Remembered Hills" (and "Joe's Ark" & "Cream in my Coffee" ISBN 0-571-17906-1 - Faber 1996). The change in the UK more generally is conveyed both in the Dennis Potter biography by W. Stephen Gilbert [Fight & Kick & Bite - published by Sceptre - ISBN 0-340-64048-0] and in Potter's many "plays" for television.  2004 saw the release of original TV programmes on DVDs ten years after his death - "Pennies From Heaven" BBCDVD1214 from Mar 1978, "Brimstone & Treacle" recorded in 1976 but not broadcast until Aug 1987 - BBCDVD1412 and "Casanoova" from Nov 1971 - BBCDVD1446.

His early and controversial TV play "Son of Man", the Wednesday Play for 16 April 1969, also reflects the reality of the non-conformist Christian community in the Forest.  The Bible had come to seem almost a local document.
The Dead Sea was the large dreary pond near a pit, edged with reed, stones and scraggy trees whose roots twisted back to the surface like half-buried arms in a poisoned soil.
The valley of the shadow of death - trees arched their black tops above the gauged-out lane falling to the bottom of Joyford, an overhung, shadowy, stumbly lane where people walked quickly, whistling.