The West Country Bottle Museum - curated by Mike Slater.
Here are images and descriptions of examples mainly from my past and
present collection of antique bottles (some now sadly dispersed) with
some historical notes. These bottles were used by companies from towns
and villages of North West Wiltshire,
England as listed below. This project is intended as a strictly
non-profit resource for local and family historians. My research has
included spending a lot of time in records offices and local study
centres in years gone by, with directories and old documents and books.
Nowadays, however, subscription sites like ancestry.co.uk
and the British
Newspaper Archive have proved particularly useful. I must also
thank the other collectors who have allowed me to use photographs for
this project. I hope to gradually extend the project, time permitting,
and the research is always ongoing.
After a gap of a
few years I am now collecting again from these areas and also Bristol
area and am always happy to hear of or acquire items from the region. A Bristol page can be found here,
and from there you can jump to other indices of Bristol companies. As
Bristol has been a large city for a good while there are a great many
companies who used their own bottles, often locally made too. Any text
in blue is a link that will take you to another page. Most pages will
have a link at the bottom that will bring you back here. I hope to be
adding Bath and Malmesbury to the list at some point in the future.
Contact the virtual
bottle museum
Bibliograhy of online free resources that were useful in this research:
Familysearch
: Parish Registers - a Guide to the
British Batches (Archer Software).
FreeBMD
: Births, Marriages and Deaths -
post 1837 GRO registration.
FreeREG
: A limited collection of Parish
Register entries.
Special Collections Online :
The University of Leicester
collection of historic Directories.
Box
People and Places : An online
magazine about the history of the village and community of Box,
Wilts.
Georeferenced
Maps : National Library
of Scotland's collection of georeferenced historic ordnance
survey maps, and satellite imagery.
Click on the place you wish to visit.
