The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.1 | June 2023

Local Group Programmes

Meetings Some groups are having their meetings online or as hybrid with people at the venue and via Zoom, to join these please email the group leader for details. Please check the HGS Website for latest details of where / how the meetings will take place. You can join in with the or international or national group meetings by zoom.

Contact: Jane Hurst – 82, The Butts, Alton, Hants GU34 1RD Tel: 01420 86701 Email: janehurst1@gmail.com

Alton Meetings are normally held monthly on the second Monday at 7:30 p.m. in All Saints Church Hall, Queens Road, Alton.

(February) After our Annual Review, we shared our progress. The ancestor of one member was a gardener on estates such as Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Starting as an under-gardener, he also worked at Bodnant. Having written to several estate archives, the member found that some were very helpful and some were not - but a general picture of the gardener's life was emerging with some relevant items in newspapers having also come to light. Another member's grandfather had been in Egypt in WWII and then crossed to Italy and Monte Cassino. He had served as a batman to both an English and an American officer. The latter had always given him a silver half dollar to keep when there was fighting, in the hope that he would return to claim it back - but one day he did not. and we were shown it. As an Archive Ambassador for the Hampshire Archives, I sometimes get given items for deposit or accessioning. This time I took one of several beautiful Victorian photograph albums and a very large family tree that has been done to show the connections between the people in the pictures. The main surname was Retallack and they were based at Place Farm in Binsted. Like many groups, we are greatly reduced in size and now only have Members' Meetings. This will continue and we hope that numbers will pick up as time goes on. (March) Members met and shared their research. First was the information that you can print out the 1921 census from Find My Past at the Library. This had enabled one of us to find some of his family - but not his father. Eventually he was found on a reformatory ship moored off Purfleet in the Thames. Now the question is - why was he there? Another member was looking for the Smeeth family of Wield and Preston Candover. So far records had led to a probable ancestor named Bernard in the late 1700s and a John Smeeth in the 1600s.

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