Routledge family and an email on Hampshire

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!

Hampshire Genuki Webpages

I have been managing the Hampshire Genuki Webpages for about five years and the first four went quite well as I worked away at them. However this past year with first my illness, then moving our newly graduated Ph.D. daughter and marrying our youngest daughter took their toll on my activities. Plus I was starting to get in over my head with the html coding. I simply could not get some of my pages to work properly. A new volunteer has taken over the Church database which will take a good deal of the work out of my hands. I shall endeavour to maintain the pages until someone comes forward to take them on. But my mailbox is now almost empty as it was filling up with the exact locations on Churches and other information and I simply could not keep up with everything. Plus I had committed to doing our new son-in-law's family tree for the wedding and that proved to be a very rewarding and interesting task.

As I mentioned earlier I produced an *.pdf file of his family thus far and it is over 400 pages. My own on which I have worked for seven years now is less than 200 pages! My husband's book though is two separate lines for his parents and easily 1000 pages as he has acquired so much information in his years of researching.

I will continue working on proving his paternal grandmother's lines back to the 3x great grandparents and then I want to extract the proofs for his mother's parental lines although already proven by his aunt (I am extracting the relevant documents from ancestry to add to the Legacy file).

A good day for me as I cleared out my mailbox which has been steadily accumulating since last June when I did my last successful updating of the Church database for Hampshire. I still have a number of items for my OPC work to clear away and for my DNA study groups. But the help with Hampshire will make these pages so much more useful for people although I often get comments from people thanking me for what is there already which is great. I can not take the credit though as the pages are automatically generated from the Parish database which I did revise in order that the automatic generation could be done.

I am finding though that copyright rules prevent my adding to the pages as I had originally thought that I would. As they stand now they provide a tremendous amount of information for the researcher in terms of locations, parishes nearby, etc.

Today I shall sew.

Andover Parish Registers - 13

Today I completed the baptisms in the first register of St Michael Parish Church, Andover, Hampshire, England - 2518 baptisms. I started the marriages also beginning in 1587 and I have entered 34 marriages. Again I am hoping to find all the Blake marriages and although these are on the IGI the priest does, on occasion, mention the location and in the case of the Blake family that is very very helpful to me.

Tomorrow is our eldest daughter's birthday so we went off shopping for what she wanted which was a new digital camera. She has usually been the inheritor of my husband's hand me downs but this past year my husband bought our youngest a digital camera that she wanted for Christmas and our eldest mentioned that the two hand me downs have now given out so she has only her cell phone (which actually takes really good pictures) so that will be our birthday present to her for this year. We found a neat little case and the 11th season of MASH to go with it. I know she will enjoy them. She has sent us absolutely marvelous pictures from Long Island - snow on Jones Beach and beautiful images of Manhattan in all the seasons.

Tomorrow I will continue to work on the marriages from the Andover Parish Registers. I also want to spend some time on my Genuki webpages for Hampshire. I have a number of entries from people for the Church database. I think I may add my baptisms to the Andover webpage. Usually I proofread them but that would make this an even more enormous task. People will write to me to query items and I will let them help me proofread them.

Andover Parish Registers - 7

Andover Parish Registers continued to be my focus and I have completed to November 1617 and there are now 1456 baptisms in the Andover Parish Registers. I can separate out most of the Blake lines in this time period but I have one conflict with two John Blake fathers which I shall have to see if I can resolve with the wills. This is a time of several Blake families attending the Parish Church at Andover and baptizing their children. I thought I would find more of the baptisms for the daughters of Richard's children but not thus far. I have 39 pages of baptisms completed with 39 remaining - half way through Register 1!

I also proofread the Poor Law Rate files that I had produced for Andover a week or so ago. I extracted all the Blake entries and sent them on to the person with whom I am working. I need to convert my excel file to a word document for her and send it on.

The editor of the Cumbria Journal wrote to ask me to check over the Lanercost Protestation Returns as she has decided to publish them. I added a preamble and the text that is included on the Returns. I hope that people find it valuable and it will be about two pages in total. I decided to use only my name and take full responsibility for the transcription. That seemed like the appropriate way. I also mentioned that I had transcribed the rest of Eskdale Ward if any of the readers want to contact me.

I babysat the dogs today and they were good. We spent a lot of the early day inside because it was raining but then we were outside for awhile. They certainly love running up and down the yard. The baby is growing up fast and will soon be an adult dog. The older dog has established himself as the leader although he is about one third the size of the other dog. The other dog looks to him for "advice."

Tomorrow I will continue with the Parish Registers. I also want to get started proofreading some other items. Also, I want to update my Genuki webpages with some of the information that has been flowing in the past couple of weeks.

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 5 April 2009

Returning to working on the Salt Lake City images and I transcribed Milton Abbas Poor Law Records for 1696 and 1656 today. Very interesting reading and I need to analyze them now to see if I have added to the information on my Arnold family who lived at Milton Abbas in the 1600s and 1700s by parish records. Hannah Arnold married Charles Butt at Winterborne Stickland and they were my 3x great grandparents. I will continue transcribing the Milton Abbas records to see if any interesting Arnold information emerges. The next set of Poor Law records are for Turnworth and those I am going to find extremely interesting as my Knight family quite dominate the parish registers at Turnworth in the 1800s.

I also added a list of surnames to the Hampshire England DNA project with assistance from the coordinator for the Devon Project. I had drawn out a list from the UK Surnames site but I added to that the Kingsclere site which she had mentioned to me. Up to three members now and I am hopeful that this particular study will form the nucleus of my Hampshire research. Managing the Hampshire Genuki pages gives me the opportunity to really add detail to the parishes of Hampshire.

Tomorrow I shall continue working on the Milton Abbas records. Other than the APG committee that I am serving on I do not have any commitments that are time related. I really want it to be like that so that I can work on items at my call rather than being dictated to by the needs of presenting or assisting.

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 10 Nov 2008

Today was a sorting day looking at the various items that I brought back and deciding an orderly manner in which to transcribe or otherwise interpret them. My excel file of all the images includes the picture number, the area that was being researched (usually the village/town/city but sometimes the county only), the item that was being photographed and the date. That way I can sort it by image number, area, item or date. In retrospect it will be a workable system. Setting it up initially was a quandry as I didn't know at the beginning how many pictures I would take.

I decided to update my Legacy file as I never do that when I am on the road or away from my main computer researching. I always record all the changes in a word file although might actually enter them into the legacy file on my portable computer. I want to maintain the integrity of my Legacy file though and avoid making quick changes that haven't had time to "gel" in my mind. I had obtained a number of baptism, marriage and burial entries and that resulted in my deciding to update my webpage with five new family lines since I had acquired what I consider to be a sufficient number of details. This time it was the Durnford, Ellis, Hemsley, Hilton and Tanner family names that were added. I now have 39 surnames traced back in varying degrees on my webpage. I also have an *.pdf file associated with many of them (still remaining to do for the new additions today) which includes the marriage partner and date for each generation if known. I can extract the Relationship to me chart from Legacy and put it into an *.pdf file for ftp to my webpage. I have found this to be a very worthwhile use of my webspace as I have been receiving the occasional email from people asking about some of my information or whether I know where their family line fits in.

I believe I shall now split my effort a little between the land tax assessments for Devon and Protestation Returns into a table (I copied the originals) for use with my one name studies on Pincombe and Siderfin. I am considering putting my Lambden study in hibernation simply because I haven't had enough time to really get into the study and perhaps someone else will pick up this study if it isn't being worked on by me. Two studies appear to be sufficient work for me at the moment. I have entered four of the twelve charts that I received from the Pincombe one name study that existed before I took the task on and for the Siderfin I have managed to locate and put into family lines most of the Siderfin individuals that I have found in parish and civil records up to 1900 and these I have added to the excellent family chart made by James Hooper Saunders in 1910.

I am also planning to spend some time each day now on the Genuki Hampshire webpages. I wanted to go to England and see Hampshire myself before I put too much more effort into the pages. I am now satisfied that I can continue with this project and do it justice - not as much as a native Hampshire person but the best that I can do from afar.