Friends of Pitminster is an independent community site about the church of St Andrew and St Mary, the village of Pitminster, and the families who left it for America. It is kept by descendants of one of those families, with roots in Maine, together with friends of the village.
It is not the parish's official site and does not speak for the Parochial Church Council, the Blackdown Benefice or the Diocese of Bath and Wells. For services, parish business and giving, use the parish's own channels: A Church Near You and blackdown.org.uk. This site handles no money.
It tries to give the church, the village and the emigrant families equal weight, and to be useful to someone standing in the churchyard, someone who has lived here all their life, and someone in Connecticut who has just found the name Pitminster in a family Bible.
Everything on these pages is written from the published record, listed below, and from a distance. Where the record is a tradition rather than a document, the text says so. If you know better, write to the editors; corrections are made and credited.
The photographs are from Geograph Britain and Ireland and are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. Each is credited where it appears:
The bear rampant in the Treat arms is adapted from an illustration by Rinaldum on Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, recoloured. The typefaces are Libre Caslon Text and Libre Caslon Display, under the SIL Open Font License; Caslon was the type of eighteenth-century England and of the printed Declaration of Independence, which seemed right for a page about both.
The site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. When you post a note on the wall or send a message, the site stores what you typed, the time, and a scrambled version of your network address used only to stop floods of spam. Email addresses are never shown and never passed to anyone else. To have a note or message removed, ask, and it will be deleted.