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

Local Group Programmes

Records do exist pre-1485 and these generally include wills / probate, apprenticeships, freemen, accounts, manorial, Poor Law and land ownership ‘post-mortems’. From 1200, civil and criminal court / assizes records exist and from 1400 there are some emigrant and refugees records. Legal documents were usually written in Latin. Most original records exist at local record offices or the National Archives. Familysearch.org contains many scanned, but not indexed, documents from this time. Also mentioned were British History online and the “overlooked” British Library. Alarmingly, wills could contain slaves bequeathed to beneficiaries but also named servants who might be left something. Other hand-written items include personal letters and diaries which can be very revealing. The dissolution of the monasteries brought about much change. Non-conformists church records expanded - people were fined for non-church attendance. There was also a ‘land grab’ resulting in more maps, legal and informal manorial records. Parliamentary records (at British-history.ac.uk) are well maintained and include things like state papers and widow Civil War petitions for financial aid. Other later records include named individuals liable to pay taxes for land, hearths and windows. Poll (voting) books, trade directories and fire insurance records (from 1680) are to be found. From 1686, Huguenot immigrant records began and the term ‘refugee’ first appeared. Technology enabled printing innovations; this made the recording of events easier to create and distribute, so from the 1660s we can find directories, maps, diaries (Pepys), newspapers, books and pamphlets. We were all inspired to investigate further back in time using the resources presented. (October) Digging deeper into the County archives – Jan Smith. Jan is an experienced archivist who had worked at the Hampshire Records Office (HRO). She drew upon this knowledge to provide us with an appreciation of those local resources not necessarily available on the internet. Historically, archives were created to run daily activities – now they are used to preserve our history. Documents come from churches, schools, hospitals, businesses, courts, clubs, organisations and individuals etc. The HRO houses 8 miles of document shelving and it’s not all digitised or indexed so there is still a requirement to browse original documents. Navigating this content is helped using the online Catalogue - a comprehensive search interface that provides a generous description of the contents which may form part of a collection. Individuals are not always named and so we have to order the originals and read them. Wills are a rich source of personal information. Hand-written, simple wills prior to 1858 were proved in the local church (archdeacon’s) courts. Wills including possessions spanning more than one archdeaconry or diocese were proved in the archbishop’s court or the Prerogative Court of Canterbury or York. HRO houses 25,000 such wills. Some older wills include household inventories – a very personal insight into everyday life. All wills can be browsed on microfiche. Jan traced the transition from hand-written to printed resources. Originally all documents were hand-written – legal ones in Latin. These included many court records from the church, manors and civil assizes. As time progressed, some record keeping was standardised using printed forms that could be filled in by hand. This would include later parish records, the census returns, military and migration records and registers.

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