Celia Heritage gave a fascinating lecture with a lot of examples and details of websites and other points of reference in her talk Tracing a 16th and 17th Century Family Tree. As usual Celia had a handout for this talk which allowed us all to concentrate on what she was saying without the need to take lots of notes. The handout is available from her website. It became clear from audience responses that a number of the areas for research were not familiar to us making this an extremely valuable evening providing guidance in moving our research on.
Having begun by noting the problem areas for research covering this period, Celia quickly moved on to looking at the various places that would open up records that have the potential to provide details of our ancestors whether rich or poor. A number of pointers given will take us away from the computer and back to record offices, whether National Archives or more local county and specialist archives, and that lovely feeling of really touching history. Among the records not well served by the large on-line companies were Chancery, Manorial, Quarter Sessions, Heraldry, Guild, and Hearth tax.
A point worth noting when looking into our poorer ancestors is that if we go back far enough we may well find they come from families who had a greater degree of wealth and status. The impact of the rule of primogeniture meaning that younger sons of younger sons not inheriting the family wealth will have steadily diluted their status.
A cautionary note was to make sure and do as much on-line investigation first to ascertain reference numbers for the records you want to view in order to save as much time as possible when at the relevant archive. Inevitably there will be times when unfortunately nothing positive will be come of a visit but that is something most of us will have experienced already in our research, either when visiting archives or at home on the computer.
Report by Peter Rose
Next meeting
Tuesday 12th November 2019
Personal experiences and the Great War
A history talk by Michael Lucas