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

Local Group Programmes

Victorian times, it was someone in industrial towns who would knock on peoples’ doors to wake up shift workers. Our ancestors may have bought their ice creams from a ‘Hokey Pokey Man’ a vendor who sold his goods in parks or on street corners. A ‘Tapping Table Worker’ not someone who irritatingly taps their fingers on a table but one who removes the air bubbles from chocolate. These name just a handful of the jobs that were discussed. Kirsty, on some of the occupations, went into greater detail of what the work involved. She also used documents to bring alive the jobs of our ancestors, these included census returns. (March) Tracing your House History – Lucy Browne Members from all over the world joined in for this Zoom meeting, including Canada, Shropshire. We welcomed Lucy to our meeting who gave a very informative talk on tracing your house history. We travelled through time including how useful the 1939 Register, the Censuses, electoral rolls and directories could help tell you who lived in your house before you. The importance of talking to neighbours, especially the oldest members within the community can help you build a picture of how your house may have evolved over time. Useful advice was given of using parish association websites, One Place Studies and Facebook community pages to add to your knowledge of the district. Lucy stressed the value of looking at maps of the area of where your house is, from the current street maps, back through the various series of OS maps to the tithe maps of your parish. Lucy provided a live illustration of using NLS (National Library of Scotland) map images of Cosham and Wymering through the ages. Many pointers were given throughout the talk to aid your research including whether boundaries of the parish or the county had changed, this may affect what local or county record offices need to be visited. The GENUKI site and the Manorial Documents Register (MDR) on the National Archives website are also useful tools to aid you. (April) Members Evening – Tracing your House History Following on from the talk in March on researching your house history the doors were open into their homes of some of our members, when 13 members joined including from Australia. Some people had been in their houses for many years, while one member had only moved in this year. The age of the property also varied from the 20th century back to the 17th century, which obviously had a bearing of what the buildings were constructed of. Some members verbally discussed their research, while others had prepared a visual presentation and I would like to thank those individuals for the time and effort that they took in preparing their pieces. It was a very thought provoking evening and it gave each of us ideas of how we can progress our own studies. Lucy Brown joined us for this meeting and she was greatly interested in the findings of our members who participated and how they hope their research will develop over time. One member from abroad is going to look into their house history there and others will continue with their research, based on this it was decided that we will re-address this topic again next year to be updated on everyone’s progress.

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