The author

REX NEEDLE is a retired journalist with extensive experience in newspapers, television and radio, who has been running the Bourne web site since August 1998 with the assistance of his wife Elke.

He has been researching the history of Bourne for the past twelve years and the results have been committed to a CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne. There have been previous histories of the town but this archive now surpasses them all, containing more than 4,000 photographs and over a million and a half words of text.

Some of this material is on display at the Heritage Centre, the town's museum, and is also used in the town guide, while other web sites that have an interest in Bourne, both in Britain and abroad, continually seek permission to include subject matter relevant to their own interests. Regular illustrated articles written by the author are also published by The Local newspaper in Bourne and in various magazines in Lincolnshire and elsewhere.

Copies of the CD-ROM have been made available to Lincolnshire County Archives, public libraries and schools for use in social history studies while a companion book, The Bourne Chronicle, was published in the summer of 2005, a second, Tales of Bourne from Past Times, in 2009 and a third, Brief Lives of Bourne People in 2010. A further book covering a wider area, Stamford, Bourne and The Deepings, illustrated with water colour paintings by the artist Alan Oliver, was published in 2009.

The constantly expanding genealogy section on the web site has also put many people in touch with lost relatives while the discussion forum is highly regarded as one of the liveliest and best informed in the region and a model for other community web sites.