Owned and operated by East Boldre Community Stores Limited
Community Benefit Society, number 8481
MICHAEL PHILLIPS
SACRED
MICHAEL PHILLIPS
who died Dec 28th1829
...Dec 182?
This stone is almost completely unreadable as the surface is very eroded. It is also cracked and in the past has been repaired with (lead?) strips. Not all is quite as lost as it first appears...based on research the green text in the inscription left is an educated guess at the missing letters based on the following research.
From the few remaining letters it is highly likely this stone commemorates a Michael Phillips. With no such burial recorded in the surviving burial register (1837 - 1894) this burial must either pre or post-date this record. Barely discernable in the RTI image the following line gives us a clue,1829.
At the start of the Beaulieu Rails Church book of 1860 there is a summary of the church's history which mentions:
"In the month of March 1810 Mr Giles, then pastor of the Church in New Lane Lymington, came and preached in the house of Isaac Tinsley (a man long held in high esteem as a consistent, devoted and useful Christian). Good resulted from the word preached and the house was soon found to be too small when Mr Michael Phillips offered for a season the use of his barn; but it was deemed desirable if possible to build a chapel."
Later in the same record Michael Phillips is listed as baptised into the Baptist congregation on 9th March 1819 and died 28th December 1829 😊.
The Rev Comyn's notebooks (c. 1817) list Michael and Elizabeth Phillips (nee Tinsley) as dissenters owning several acres and a shop. Jude James subsequent research indicates this was over 16 acres of land and included three labourers cottages so they were obviously quite well off. Jude's 'Comyn's New Forest' indicates that they lived at BRS6 (now Manor Bank Cottage) and owned (BRS 7,8 and 9 - land that now includes Norfolk House, Camellias, North Repps Cottage, Furzymoor, Norfolk End and Bagshot Moor and the adjacent fields).
Turning to Ancestry UK with this information we found that Michael was born in 1765 to John and Elizabeth (nee Robinson) and was baptised at Beaulieu church on 26th May 1765. He had a brother Benjamin (1764 - 1866) and a sister Elizabeth (1763 - 1845).
Aged 25, he married Elizabeth Tinsley (22) from Fawley on 9th February 1790 at Beaulieu Church and together they had ten children (Comyns notebooks shows nine, Robert is missing) over the next twenty four years.
Michael was 64 when he died.
The seems to be a second name on the gravestone and a date 'Dec 182?' but not enough information to find an identity. This may be his wife Elizabeth as she is not buried at Boldre or Beaulieu.
Reflectance Transformation Imaging
3D model
produced by photogrammetry