Links to other Brain Sites

You’ve probably arrived here from our own Brain Family History pages.   If not, you can follow this link to reach them.

Our Brains originated in north Gloucestershire and south Warwickshire.  In particular, they lived for centuries in the small village of Stretton-on-Fosse:  a genealogical resources site for the village is maintained by local historian Donald Holdsworth.

The surrounding villages also boasted various Brain families, almost certainly related to ours in the eighteenth century and earlier.  I’ve started to list detailsof them here.

In the 1840s John Brain moved with his family from Stretton-on-Fosse to Glascote, on the outskirts of Tamworth, where he and his descendants for the next eighty or so years worked at a terracotta works, “Gibbs & Canning” – now the subject of a web-site by local schoolteacher Angella Streluk.

Other family groups, almost certainly unrelated to us, were the Brains of the Forest of Dean, and those of the Bristol / Bath area (or are they one interrelated group?).  It’s from those families that the brewers “SA Brain” of Cardiff originate, as did English boxing champion Benjamin “Big Ben” Brain.  (And surely it can’t have been our side of the family which produced the murderer, George Brain?)

Perhaps the best-known Brain in England was the horn-player Dennis Brain.  He died in the same year that I was born, and (a horn-player myself) I hoped for a while that his muse had been reassigned to me;  however my friends soon disabused me of this idea.

I’ve only found a few interesting web-pages posted by Brains.  (It’s hard to track them down, since entering ‘Brain’ in a search-engine leads to lots of neurological sites.)  You might try these:

Eric Brain is one of the ‘Bath’ Brains mentioned above, and is a “Thermodynamic Automotive Technician” at Bath University, with a penchant for tortoises.  Steve Brain has been homeless for fifteen years, sells the Big Issue and is currently cycling round Britain with his two dogs (or, at least, he was a year ago, since when his trail’s gone cold!)

Across the Atlantic, an astrophysicist in Colorado, David Brain, has had the whimsical, and pleasantly egocentric, idea of making a web-page of links to all those he can find who share his name.

Perhaps with real-life Brains hard to find, the answer is to read about fictional namesakes:  Mr Arthur Brain has lost his National Savings book, according to Bill Payd of the non-existent newspaper The Stun.

And of course there’s a wealth of other sites on the web to help you with your Brain and other genealogical researches.

Do you know of other good sites to add to this page?   Please e-mail me if so!

Our Brain Family                Other Brain Families

John & Liz’s Family History          John & Liz’s welcome page

page revised August 2003