An interesting request for information on Southampton, Hampshire and I put together a list of some of the interesting resources for this English county that I have at hand and decided to share it with my blog.
Depending on how far back the association with Southampton is, there are a number of interesting published records for Hampshire which include:
The Hampshire Hearth Tax Assessment of 1665 and in the case of Southampton it is the Hearth Tax Assessment of 1670 that is published in this particular book. This book is a good birds eye view of Hampshire in this time period.
West Hampshire Lay Subsidy Assessments, 1558-1603 (Andover, Kingsclere and New Forest Divisions), edited by Douglas F Vick (Family History Library). I copied Andover Hundred only as that was my interest but the New Forest is in the Southampton area so might be interesting. A valuable resource in this time period (my Blake line goes back to the late 1400s in the Andover area so have looked at a lot of the records in this area back to this time period).
The Parish Records are particularly good in Hampshire and can be purchased directly from the Hampshire Record Office at a very reasonable price (microfiche) and a lot of them do go back to the beginning of the Parish Registers (1538) and can be purchased right up to the present if that is helpful.
In general Hampshire is not available on any of the major providers (FindMyPast, Ancestry, Origins, etc.) as they have published a lot of their own records through the Hampshire Genealogical Society. I was a member for eight years and will be again but traveling about as we have done for the last four years I cancelled most of my subscriptions. The articles in their journal tend to be on families of the 1800s on so depending on the time period you are looking at your may find it interesting looking at their journal (available at Allen County Public Library and Family History in Salt Lake City). Federated Family History Societies holds their material for sale: http://www.genfair.co.uk/supplier.php?sid=59
Their are a number of books published on individual cities/towns in Hampshire but Southampton has been a large city for at least one hundred and fifty years. My father was born at Eastleigh (now a suburb of Southampton) in 1904 and he recalled as a child going into Southampton and that it was a large city even then with Eastleigh itself being a substantial town. The New Forest lies in Dorset but right across the Southampton Waters from Southampton. This is an area like Dutchess County (my enquirer was from the United States) with peoples from the west and north west of England moving towards the more economically viable area of Southampton/Portsmouth through the last two hundred years and the only practical way was through the New Forest which is honeycombed with roads going everywhere plus the railroad.
The Census of Hampshire is very complete (few areas are missing) from 1841 to 1911 and available on FindMyPast and Ancestry (FindMyPast has better transcriptions but Ancestry has a really powerful search engine techniques but you can search the 1911 census returns on the UK government website and do remarkable searching just there).
The Electoral Registers would also be a good source although I have not yet looked at them for Hampshire. I suspect that involves a trip to Hampshire Record Office which is in Winchester (an amazing collection of mediaeval buildings still exist in this city including ancient walls and it is not hard to find your way about). The database at the Hampshire Record Office is online and has a good search engine (http://www3.hants.gov.uk/archives/catalog.htm). They will do hard copy or images and they are most reasonable and make excellent copies.
There are Pollbooks for Southampton (the county was called Southampton and depending on how long ago a family name is associated with Southampton it could have meant the county) which can be helpful in the 1700s.
This is off the top of my head and certainly the Hampshire Genuki webpages have a lot of material that might be helpful (I used to manage these but passed them on to a local Hampshire resident fortunately!). http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/HAM/
The yDNA Hampshire Study has not been overly successful. About 1/4 of the people only have a paper trail back to Hampshire. Most of the members are American. I have been trying to get a couple of people who live in England interested in taking over the study as they could encourage more people who trace back to Hampshire to test. My line (Blake) is one of the few where the actual location of the ancestor is known.
Kew (Public Record Office in London, England) has an excellent online website: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ The holdings for Hampshire are quite extensive there as well although Winchester is the best place for Hampshire records.
I have a lot of Hampshire material but it is generally in the Andover Hundred/Registration District where my families have lived for over six hundred years. I have not yet seen the surname Grooms in this area to my knowledge but will over the coming days check some of the excel transcription files that I have produced.
Back to Routledge and Tom Routledge has sent me a couple of new documents to transcribe. I have begun and noted that Jock Routledge is mentioned in this document. It is from 1543 and not one of the common transcription documents so no help online for this one likely. I will again post it to the blog as I transcribe it and correct the document as I move along with it.
The Gathering of the Clans is now set for July 2014 and we hope to attend. That is as always dependent on my husband's health. Perhaps that will be the time when we sell our house and in between we will do a bit of traveling. Sounds very interesting actually!
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