Francis Hindes Groome

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Francis Hindes Groome bigraphy, stories - miscellaneous writer, son of a clergyman, wrote for various encyclopaedias, etc

Francis Hindes Groome : biography

30 August 1851 – 24 January 1902

Francis Hindes Groome (30 August 1851 in Monk Soham, Suffolk – 24 January 1902 in London), miscellaneous writer, son of Robert Hindes Groome Archdeacon of Suffolk, wrote for various encyclopaedias, etc. He was a student of the Romani people and their language, and published In Gypsy Tents (1880), Gypsy Folk Tales (1899), and an editor of Borrow’s Lavengro (1900). Other works were A Short Border History (1887), Kriegspiel (1896), a novel, and Two Suffolk Friends (his father and Edward Fitzgerald).

Groome was educated at Ipswich School, where his lifelong interest in Romanies was sparked, then at Oxford University after which he went to Göttingen. After leaving Göttingen he lived and travelled with Romanies until arriving in Edinburgh in 1876. He married a woman of Romani blood and settled in Edinburgh in 1876.

F.H. Groome later became sub-editor of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia; joint-editor of the 1897 edition of Chamber’s Dictionary of Biography and is perhaps best remembered for his six volume Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland which appears in full at the . It also appears as part of the , produced by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and is directly searchable within .

He worked with David MacRitchie as editor of the quarterly journal of the Gypsy Lore Society until its dormancy in 1892.

Groome died 24 January 1902 and was buried at Monk Soham, Suffolk.