Many people would like to find out more about the history of their house and if this sounds like you then there is a great book that is both compact and filled with practical information. The book is equally of interest to those who live in a manor house or a small cottage cottage, a tied house, a two up and two down Victorian terrace, a twentieth-century council house or even a converted warehouse
In Tracing Your House History the author, Gill Blanchard, shows the reader how to trace the history of their home be it a house or a flat. All this is done in a series of concise, information-filled chapters that will help you understand the lives of the people who lived in your home before you as well as understanding how to fit what you discover into the wider history of your city, town or village.
Gill Blanchard explores what can be found in a wealth of historical evidence that is available to researchers in libraries, archives and record offices as well as in books and in online resources. The book looks at these resources in detail and explains their significance before pointing the researcher towards finding the most relevant, and revealing, aspects of them. Gill has made the research process understandable, accessible and fun in this book, and she manages to demystify the sometimes obscure language and layout of the documents that people doing their house history will come up against.
The ideal introduction for anyone researching the history of their house and home
Identifies the key local and national sources that researchers can use
Shows you how you can discover who lived in your property in the past
Describes how buildings are adapted as times change
Explains the development of regional architectural styles
Keeping Chronicles is the latest book by Rosemary Sassoon. It intends to show the many ways handwritten and other documents from family archives and other sources are so valuable, not only to the family concerned, but to local as well as national museums.
The many examples within the book illustrate different categories such as letters, diaries, travel records, business and legal ones, personal scrapbooks, school books and cookery books etc. Also included is practical advice from professionals in the field about how to preserve such items and present them for safekeeping to museums.
Rosemary discusses her own memorabilia collection and shows how she has preserved these historical items. After giving talks on the matter of preserving written items, Rosemary was saddened to hear that so many people discarded such memorabilia, destroying family history in a minute, because they were unsure of how to preserve these items to keep. This book will inspire readers to start their own memorabilia collection.
Rosemary Sassoon has written over 30 books across a variety of academic and design subjects. She was originally a designer in textiles and various aspects of letterforms. Later she was asked to deal with serious handwriting problems in schools. This developed from educational into more medical aspects of the subject and resulted in a PhD from the University of Reading. Research then ensued Rosemary’s family of typesets, originally called Sassoon Primary, to find what typographic letters children could read the easiest. This was later developed for other purposes including as a stylistic model for handwriting. Both are widely used worldwide. Rosemary now lives in Australia.
If your ancestor held a prominent position in a religious organisation then you may find them in amongst a number of recent releases at TheGenealogist.co.uk. The new records include:
The Year Book of The Church of England in the Dominion of Canada 1926 & 1935 - These year books contain the details of the members of clergy in Canada.
New Zealand Methodist Union Index 1913 - Listing details of Methodist Ministers and their placements in New Zealand up to 1912.
Catholic Directory 1867 & 1877 - Directories of Catholic Clergy with addresses for England, Scotland and Wales.
Biographical Dictionary of English Catholics 1534 to 1885 - This work by Joseph Gillow gives biographies of prominent Catholics which often include details of their family, education and achievements.
Shropshire Roman Catholic Registers 1763-1837
The Roman Catholics in the County of York 1604
Various Catholic Record Society volumes - These include a variety of interesting records including various Catholic Church registers, memoirs and letters of prominent Catholics and Recusant Rolls.
Jewish Year Books 1896-99, 1901-8, 1910-11, 1918-21, 1925, and 1928-39 - These year books list the details of prominent people within each synagogue, obituaries, Jewish officers in the Army, Navy and Auxiliary Forces, Ministers, MPs, Peers, and even Jewish 'Celebrities' of the time.
Jewish Synagogue Seatholders in London for 1920, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1929, 1931, 1933, 1937
The Clergyman's Almanack 1821 & 1822 - These Almanacks list archbishops, bishops, dignitaries, MPs and Peers.
Register of Missionaries 1796-1923 - A register of the missionaries and deputations of the London Society of Missionaries. This book includes many details about each missionary, as well as listing their wives (including their maiden name).
Durham Diocesan Calendar 1931
These records compliment an already wide range of religious occupational records such as Cox's Clergy Lists and Crockford's Clerical Directories, Jewish Seatholders, Catholic Registers, and Directories already on TheGenealogist.
Diamond subscribers can access these records by going to the Search tab on the home page - scrolling down to Occupational Records and then selecting the type of records that they are interested in.
Go to: TheGenealogist.co.uk.
Save £14.95 when you buy RootsMagic UK Version 7 Platinum Edition & Getting the Most out of RootsMagic 7 Book - only £49.95!
RootsMagic has become one of the UK's most favoured genealogy packages. This software is comprehensive yet easy to use, and creates superb wallcharts and integrates with research sites. It is the top rated program in numerous reviews and articles which emphasise RootsMagic's ease of use and powerful features.
Version 7 is the latest edition of this award-winning full-featured genealogy program published by S&N. This great package is authored by Bruce Buzbee, the author of Family Origins.
UK Platinum Edition - with over £105 worth of online data and CDs
S&N's most popular package, the UK Platinum Edition includes:
RootsMagic 7 UK Edition software
3 Month Online subscription to the award winning website www.TheGenealogist.co.uk, providing access to BMDs, Census 1841 - 1901, Military Rolls of Honour, Directories, Parish Records, Wills, Land Owner Records, and more.
Bartholomew's 1898 Atlas of England and Wales, a complete series of topographical maps, statistical charts, town plans, and index of 35,000 place names. This atlas also contains street maps showing places no longer in existence through development or bombing in WWII.
Printed Quick Start manual
UK spellcheck dictionary
Movie Tour of RootsMagic
Index to Change of Names 1760 - 1901 UK and Ireland
General Armory of England, Scotland and Ireland 1894 (Encyclopedia of Heraldry)
English and Welsh Landowners 1873
Scottish Landowners 1872–1873
Irish Landowners
Getting the Most out of RootsMagic Book
RootsMagic is the easiest genealogy software available, yet many people will barely touch the tip of the iceberg of RootsMagic's features. If you are one of these people, then this book is for you. You start with basic data entry and continue by learning advanced techniques such as custom reports, citing sources, GEDCOM, creating user-defined facts, scanning images, and merging. Mix that with time-saving shortcuts, and you soon will have a complete understanding of RootsMagic and its hidden powers.
Written by the author of RootsMagic, Getting the Most Out of RootsMagic will teach you how to:
Create a detailed family history
Explore the advanced concepts and techniques
Properly document your entire family history for future generations
Publish your family history
Add photos to bring your family history to life
Use shortcuts to speed-up data entry
Create customised wall charts
Organise your unfinished research using RootsMagic
You may need to be quick, but here is a great special offer we spotted this week. Makes a great gift for family historians!
Save 40% on the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers
This guide to parish registers, now in its third edition, and covering England, Scotland and Wales, is a vital, time-saving tool that has become universally known as 'the genealogist's bible'.
The Atlas includes the famous county 'parish' maps, which show pre-1832 parochial boundaries, colour-coded probate jurisdictions, starting dates of surviving registers, and churches and chapels, where relevant.
Topographical maps face each 'parish' map, and show the contemporary road system and other local features, to help deduce the likely movement of people beyond the searcher's starting point.
The Index lists the parishes, with grid references to the county maps. It indicates the present whereabouts of original registers and copies, and whether a parish is included in other indexes. It also gives registration districts and census information.
Thus, in this invaluable guide, the user may quickly find answers to such questions as: Have the registers been deposited? Where may they be found? What outside dates do they cover? Have they been copied or indexed and by whom?
Get your copy for £29.95
http://genealogysupplies.com/offer-of-the-week/
The new History & Heritage Handbook 2015/16 edited by Andrew Chapman and published by Heritage Hunter came out recently.
Flicking through a copy we were very impressed by just how comprehensive a guide it was to almost 3500 places and organisations in the UK , the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man all listed across more than 500 pages.
Each of the entries provides the contact details and a brief description, many of which give specific information about specialist collections.
Use it to
research your family history: includes details of county record offices and family history societies
find thousands of heritage sites to visit on holiday or for day trips
learn about special archives in museums and libraries across the UK, ideal for researching local, social or military history
Just found this New book to help you get the most out of RootsMagic at online genealogy shop: S&N Genealogy Supplies.
RootsMagic is the easiest genealogy software available, yet many people will barely touch the tip of the iceberg of RootsMagic's features. If you are one of these people, then this book is for you.
You start with basic data entry and continue by learning advanced techniques such as custom reports, citing sources, GEDCOM, creating user-defined facts, scanning images, and merging.
Mix that with time-saving short-cuts, and you soon will have a complete understanding of RootsMagic and its hidden powers.
Written by the author of RootsMagic, Getting the Most Out of RootsMagic will teach you how to:
Create a detailed family history
Explore the advanced concepts and techniques
Properly document your entire family history for future generations
Publish your family history
Add photos to bring your family history to life
Use short-cuts to speed-up data entry
Create customised wall charts
Organise your unfinished research using RootsMagic
Share your family history on the World Wide Web
No. of Pages: 383
If your surname reveals that your family came over from Normandy, the last time that England was conquered, then even today you are more likely to be upper class than the average member of the population in Britain. Quite astonishingly, the social status of your ancestors has more influence on your life chances than on your height. Normans recorded as property owners in the Domesday book of 1086 are 16 times more likely to be at Oxford or Cambridge in 1170 and still 25% more likely that their ancestors are there today.
Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis and Neil Cummins from the London School of Economics have published an article in the Journal of Human Nature that shows that social mobility from 1170 to 2012 has always been slow and even now is not much greater than in the pre-industrial period.
An example being the Bunduck family whose name regularly appeared in the registers of the Oxbridge universities consistently from the 12th century until the modern day. The Bunducks were also found on the rich property owners' database, which is another suggestion that they were of a higher class as is their appearance on the 19th century probate registry.
'Strong forces of familial culture, social connections, and genetics must connect the generations,' said Mr Clark.
'Even more remarkable is the lack of a sign of any decline in status persistence across major institutional changes, such as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, the spread of universal schooling in the late nineteenth century, or the rise of the social democratic state in the twentieth century,' added Mr Cummins.
Source: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Gregory Clark (with Neil Cummins, Yu Hao, and Daniel Diaz Vidal and others), 2014. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
If you read my last post, then you will know that with a month to go I was writing my list for Santa (or at least as a massive hint for loved ones to buy me something useful this year!). So it is very timely that this news has come in from the team at TheGenealogist:
TheGenealogist Family History Shop is now open!
Christmas is coming; it’s that time for giving and receiving again.
Are you looking for some great gifts to make a family historian happy this festive period? Simply head over to the fantastic new shop pages recently added to TheGenealogist for a great selection of scanners, software, archival storage, spring binders and charts. Made available in association with S&N Genealogy Supplies, the UK’s largest genealogy publisher and retailer, your present selection is covered this Yuletide.
While you are there, why not browse for something for yourself? To make sure that you get what you want in your stocking this year, just drop your loved ones the hint by giving them TheGenealogist shop’s page link.
Christmas is coming; it's that time for giving and receiving again. So its probably a good idea to start thinking about what a family historian might want to put on this year's letter to Santa. So here is mine to get people started!
That shoe box of photos, certificates and A4 family-pedigrees could really do with being more organised. I would really love it if, this Christmas, under my tree I'd find some hard backed binders, to protect all that valuable research I've done and preserve it in a more presentable way for future generations of the family to read.
Gift vouchers to allow me to buy exactly what I want are always well received, especially if they are family history related!
I would also be so grateful if that kind person, who regularly gives me the box of shortbread's that does nothing for my waist line after all the other food on offer at this time of year, would substitute the biscuits with a non edible present instead. Perhaps a useful set of charts to present my family tree in a more attractive way than the print out from my computer, or the scribbled hand drawn tree on that sheet of paper that I have at the moment?
At the top of my list (hint ,hint!) would be a portable scanner, to capture images of the certificates and photographs that I see on visits to my relatives or at the archives.