The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.48 No.3 | December 2021

Local Group Programmes

attendees didn’t have to rely on scribbled notes and links that could easily have been wrongly recorded. Online web resources are growing at a remarkable rate as more birth, marriage and death records (BMDs) are indexed and more parish records are scanned. Many websites provide a local bias – like GENUKI, Online Parish Clerks (OPCs) and Knightroots transcriptions for us in Hampshire - whilst others have a more national or global reach. Some of the websites discussed were fairly new but Mia also showed us how to better use other sites we are more familiar with. There is a natural split between those websites that are official and others that are set up by keen enthusiasts and small organisations. So The National Archives (TNA) and the National Library of Wales (NLW) contain legal documents, land tax records, wills, maps and other records not found elsewhere. These sites also contain a large number of free downloads if you look closely. The General Register Offices (GRO) site allows you to freely search some greatly improved indexes and to order certificates (for payment). The usual subscription sites were not included in the talk and so we heard a lot more about the expanding FamilySearch (IGI) site and how they are now making probate and some original parish record images freely available. The film numbers they use often appear in other search engines too which can be handy for cross-referencing. Many of these images are not indexed though so you may need to scroll though the records looking for entries by eye. County archives sites - like the Hants CALM database - typically contain a search catalogue. The results arising can contain very detailed descriptions of document content, providing additional background and sometimes unexpected information. There are ‘sites of sites’ with Cyndi’s List being perhaps the most longstanding and reputable source of websites. Some websites can disappear over time though and so of particular note is the ‘Way Back Machine’ website. This internet archive stores web pages that have subsequently been taken down - so if you know of a resource that is no longer available, it may be available here! There is an array of old digitised books to be found – others can be found on Google. (September) Tracing Tudor and Stuart Ancestors – Gill Blanchard. Gill is a renowned and knowledgeable speaker. She admitted at the outset that the content of her talk could easily be split into many separate ones – such is the volume of available resources! The talk covered two periods – Tudor (1485- 1603) and Stuart (1603-1714). These also included the Elizabethan and the ‘interregnum’ (when we had no monarchy during 1649-60) eras respectively. Gill gave us a helpful timeline for each period showing key events and changes that fundamentally affected the way the country was administered. Of course, getting back this far in your family research in the first place is a huge achievement based on determination and luck. The legal requirement of parish registers to record baptisms, marriages and deaths from 1538 meant that all individuals could then potentially be traced. Until then, documents were more likely to record the lives of the rich or titled – or criminals and the poor.

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