The SWAG Fair is at the Winter Gardens in Weston on Saturday July 13th – in case you are wondering - SWAG stands for the South West Area Group of Family History Societies – stretching from Hampshire to Cornwall and including South Wales, Hereford and Shropshire. A full list of exhibitors including other commercial stands and specialist societies can be seen under Latest News. Most of the stands will have people who will be eager with suggestions to help you find your lost ancestors so don’t forget to bring along your family information. For other members of your family who may not share your interest - the tide will be at its highest at the start of the Fair and at its lowest by the end of the event!
On July 1st - for those of you researching Hertfordshire ancestors a partnership between Findmypast and the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies has released about 2 million entries of baptisms, banns, marriages and burials complete with images of the original records. The trend for images to be available online is a tremendous step forward and is very welcome. Some images are also available on the free site Familysearch – Cornwall, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, and Norfolk all have some parishes where you can browse through the records looking for members of your family. UKBMD is another site which is constantly updating its range of records. The latest update for LancashireBMD took place today (2nd July) making another 90,000 records available – so it is always a good idea to look again at these sites.
The overarching UKBMD site is a good place to pick up links to other sites which may be helpful – in particular there is a link to the increasingly useful OPC (Online Parish Clerk) sites – some of these are for counties but others are for individual parishes – some provide a lookup service while others put their transcriptions online. Many of the transcriptions provided by the OPC sites are also to be found on FreeREG – another good starting point for a lost ancestor. But you always need to check with the original entry if at all possible. Errors can and do occur in all transcripts – anyone who has done any research at all will know that the handwriting on some documents can be very difficult to read.
The last members’ evening explored some of the brick walls which can be encountered and some methods of overcoming them. Asking for help from someone else can often open up a new line of research. Reading the Research Forum on this site recently I was looking at some correspondence about the ROGERS Family and I went back to one of my stumbling blocks – a Thomas ROGERS, from Wedmore, who was married in Rodney Stoke in 1759 – from his burial I had deduced that he was born in about 1735. Using FreeREG I found a possible christening in Axbridge on the 7th April 1735 and a marriage for the parents in May 1734. I started filling in the gaps with siblings and went back another generation and then suddenly discovered a burial of a Thomas ROGERS on the 8th April 1735 also in Axbridge. No age was given in the transcript but if this was the same Thomas ROGERS my brick wall is still there!
At our next meeting on July 30th we have a talk entitled “From Bristol Bobby to Hong Kong Copper“ which is the story of a group of pioneering policemen in the 1880s who served in Hong Kong. The speaker is one of our own members who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for many years. The phrase “oh, they didn’t travel much in those days†has been proved wrong so many times in family history research and Christine will explore another example of this - she is an experienced researcher and we are looking forward to this talk after which there will be a gap during August and we start again in September with another of our members, Pete Williams who will be talking about Berrow Church and its records. We will continue to provide Help Sessions at the Library during July and August and look forward to meeting everyone who is coming to the SWAG Fair of July 13th.
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