The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.48 No.1 | June 2021

Local Group Programmes

Contact: Graham Mist Tel: 01252 661247. Email: fleetandfarnborough @hgs-online.org.uk

The group normally meets at the United Reform Church Hall, Kings Rd, Fleet GU51 3AF second Thursday of every month except August at 7.30pm. Fleet & Farnborough Reports by Carol Gomm (Jan) Ethical Dilemmas in Genealog – Penny Walters

This was a look at the ethical situation surrounding family history research with Penny asking us how moral we are when constructing our trees. She started by defining what morals and ethics are and that though we may think we are moral and ethical our views may in fact conflict with others or with laws governing society. She also wanted us look at how we represent people on our tree and in family history narratives; after all we are revealing the secrets of people who, unless they are still alive, cannot give their consent or their view on what we do. She covered the arguments around DNA and the ‘professionalization’ of our hobby by those who move to a commercial footing in their research for others, and she asked what we would do if we had an ancestor with a ‘dark’ past. She reminded us that how we represent people may upset others and that we may face a balance between transparency versus privacy. This was a talk via Zoom. (Feb) St. Ives to St. Bees: Stories from the Cornish Diaspora – Geoff Key We had a participant in British Columbia (the advantages of Zoom) for Geoff’s talk which followed his family as they migrated from Cornwall in the wake of economic decline during the 19th century. Geoff placed his research against the background of tin and cooper mining and followed his family from the marriage of Nicholas Key and Eleanor Michel at Gwennap in 1794 through three further generations ending in the 1920s. The saying “St. Ives to St. Bees” was a saying in Geoff’s family about their migration around Cornwall but as Geoff was to discover this migration went much further. Geoff’s family were to find themselves not just involved in tin and copper but other mining industries. The phrase “a mine is a hole in the ground anywhere in the world with at least one Cornishman at the bottom of it” is not without some justification. (Mar) Birth & Death – The Hidden Secrets of Registration – Antony Marr This was a very good Zoom talk with Antony both clear and engaging in his presentation. The two years he spent as a deputy registrar after leaving the police force has given him an insight into the world of certificates that even as a family historian he had not appreciated before. There are a lot of rules, procedures and protocols that a registrar must follow and some surprising legal definitions. He reminded us that an index is just that – an index; it is not the whole story. Without the actual certificate you could be making some very wrong assumptions. And have you ever wondered about those little numbers that sometimes appear when a mistake has been made? Can you tell what a person actually died from? Or have you ever given any thought as to what is being represented in the indexes? If so, then this is a talk for you!

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