The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.49 No.2 | September 2022

Member’s Article

From Forest Rides to City Streets

Back in 2012, I took part in an online Pharos Tutors course on Writing up Your Family History, and finally got round to doing so. I had a few copies printed by Lulu (online self-publishing) for members of the family and sent one to HGS. I called it From Forest Rides to City Streets, many of the ancestors having lived in the New Forest, and more recently, in Southampton. It occurred to me that the introduction might make an interesting article for the Family Historian, so here it is. I was never interested in history at school, and although my father was a local historian, he had made no effort to research the family history. I began to be interested about 15 years ago, when I found a family Bible gathering dust and cobwebs in my father’s garage – the family name was Etheridge. Who were they? Every time we visited my Dad from then on, he would disappear into the front bedroom (which was piled high with paper) and come out with a document or a book or a photograph or a letter or scrap of paper, all of which raised more questions than they answered. There was an exercise book in which Edward Robert COX had written lines in 1823, there was a 1776 copy of a will made by John TAPLIN in 1706, there were lease and release documents, complete with signatures and red sealing wax, relating to land sales in 1724 and 1776. There was a rent book in the name of Carter in the 1880s and a birthday book from 1886. There were funeral cards and letters of condolence and photograph albums in which there were many family photos but very few names. (All these items were returned to the front bedroom).

Then there were the family anecdotes, often repeated by my father and his father before him. Who was my grandfather’s Uncle Robert who got drunk and watched for ships coming into the Docks? Who was Uncle POCOCK , a close friend of my grandfather’s, known as The Major? Who was Uncle Dick who had given my grandfather a walking stick, said to have belonged to King Cetewayo? Why did my father claim that the Tile Barn campsite at Brockenhurst was on land that should belong to him? And where did my father’s middle name, Daubney, come from? I started researching the family history in the days before internet indexes of baptisms, marriages and burials, so it was in the Hampshire Record Office that many of the answers came to light. It took me years to find Edward Robert COX ! I remember the thrill of seeing my Taplin ancestors’ names in the original parish registers for Soberton, written way back in the 1550s! I eventually discovered that many of the ancestors had left wills, which helped enormously, and I spent many happy (?) hours transcribing them. The New Forest records held at the Lyndhurst New Forest Centre, accessed with the help of Richard Reeves, gave me many more hours of fascinating research. At some stage, I was beginning to realise that there was something odd about the sequence of surnames. On one occasion, on leaving my father’s home after a visit, he gave me an envelope, saying ‘don’t open it until you get home’ (needless to say, it was open before we were out of his drive!) It was my grandfather’s birth certificate, with the name of his mother, but no father. It was something that wasn’t talked about by many of my

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