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

Local Group Programmes

• A lady hit whilst getting off a tram – returning from a church outing and was struck by another tram • The family who had secretly kept the body of a young man in their shed for 20 years and not reported it, c1920 • A lifeboat man drowning • Falling in a well • Falling from a horse and cart at speed For the second half, we welcomed back a different panel of four of our own members to answer genealogy questions from the audience. This was a very helpful session with questions covering a number of interesting topics. • Where / how to find a ‘missing’ burial when the locality is known and a death certificate has been obtained • The information available and the process supporting the Quarter session records now online • Differences between the Find My Past and Ancestry subscription services. Also the British Newspaper Archive now being part of FMP • The HGS’s own project of listing Britons Dying Overseas – over 86,000 transcribed records are now freely available on our website • How to find out more about WW2 war diaries • A discussion about the 123andMe DNA website being hacked and the dangers of putting our family trees on the internet (April) Migration – When we get stuck – Laurie Page We welcomed our first face-to-face guest speaker in six months to the Weyhill Fairground Hall to hear how migration had developed within England over the centuries. After an unfortunate delay on the night, due to technical problems, we listened to Laurie with great interest. Laurie had previously done some university research into migration and he called on some of this work to highlight elements of his talk. Going back in time, families often lived in the same parish for centuries – but then they might disappear from the records, causing our research to stumble. His contention was that you probably find these people very nearby. Moving to an adjacent parish was possible but determined by the conditions in the Resettlement and Removal Act of 1662. This meant a person could be returned to their own parish if they could not support themselves and sought Poor Relief. Settlement records often provide great detail about people. There was no mechanised transport, few roads and little reason to move unless you were very wealthy. Laurie showed how, using the 1851 census in one particular area, 59% of people were born in that parish with only 3% coming from outside the county! This was soon to change - primarily with the advent of the railways over the next 50 years which made widespread mass travel possible. Most moves were due to employment possibilities opening

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