The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.1 | June 2024

Member’s article

50 years of genealogy As we enter our 50th year I am reminded of how genealogy has changed in that time and noted how my own research has changed over the years. • At the start if you were lucky your parents or grandparents would have a foolscap piece of paper (pre A4) with a basic outline of per haps one or two generations of the maternal and/or paternal families put together from memories of parents, siblings, aunts, uncles which may have been roughly right. Some times hiding “family secrets” - that illegimate birth or children by mistresses. • Research involved visiting records offices or churches to view registers where you thought the family were from. Reading through them for marriages, births and burials, taking hand written notes and trying to produce family group trees. This could be very time consum ing and family recollections may not be right causing wasted hours looking through regis ters. My mother’s family were supposed to be from Brighton, with the later records below I eventually found them in Norwich! • Later you could visit or write to the local church of the Mormons to get IGI print outs for counties/names for a fee. This allowed us to see what their members had transcribed from registers they had been allowed to see. Some parishes would not give them access. Not all were transcribed if time was limited. • Computers allowed us to type up and edit notes, saving the task of updating notes. Spe cialist software could be purchased to put in formation in standard formats and even produce family trees. • The Mormons put the IGI online on their FamilySearch website which many of us still use as it is still free, although these days you have to access the site via user name and

password. They also provided a free program PAF, Personal Ancestry File, which like the paid for programs kept information in a stan dard format and could produce gedcom files to allow data to be used with other programs or shared. It also could produce various print outs of descendants or ancestors although not family trees. The program is no longer offered but if you have the download it still works, well up to Windows 10 as I still use it. Not all their data has been transcribed and some reg isters can be viewed as scanned pages if you search the latest web pages. • Many records started to be made available online with scanned images and transcrip tions. The two popular sites being Ancestry and Find My Past, accessible by subscription or sometimes free at libraries. Records are not necessarily on both. For, example Hamp shire Records Office used Ancestry, whilst Portsmouth Records Office used Find My Past. Both sites have many sources available not just parish registers or census returns, but passenger lists, rate books, society records etc. Some societies used earlier companies such as S & N for records that their members transcribed and some databases are only on alternative sites when the original records are not held publicly. So, if you do not find what you want on the two main sites it is worth searching out the other online sites and sub scribing to those. Cyndi’s List may help with sites. • Family trees ‘researched’ are often available online but need to be treated with care. Al ways check them. My great grandmother had a family of 19 on the Isle of Wight which I have researched, but Ancestry has her with another husband and large family in Scotland. Impos sible as not only did she never live in Scotland

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