Family History
Co-ordinators: Rowan Purkis & Susan Wakeford
Meetings: 2ndThursday, 10.00 a.m., Castle Street Centre
Are you interested in who your ancestors were, where they lived and what their occupations were?
We are an informal group sharing experiences, knowledge and skills of delving into the past to discover our ancestors and their lives. We help each other discover where records exist, how to access them, how to overcome the
difficulties, and how to record our information in order to build up a picture of our ancestors for future generations.
We arrange trips to conferences and to records offices and have occasional visiting speakers. (Extra charge might apply.)
New members, whether complete beginners or experienced genealogists, are welcome to our monthly group.
JUNE, JULY, AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER MEETINGS
Over the summer we plan to continue to meet on the 2nd Thursday of the month with purely a social gathering in a café in Kendal to catch up, share progress and discuss questions.
UPDATE MAY
We had a talk on DNA testing. A password protected recording of the talk and the notes to go are available DNA VIDEO
UPDATE APRIL
We discussed how we have written up our research to share it with other members of our families. No-one present had had any great success with the commercially available programmes and most who had attempted the task had written stories of one ancestor or a couple or a family line in chronological order, in a Word document with photographs in the document or in a shared web album. One member had documented heirlooms , assets , toys and other significant family items with their provenance and history.
UPDATE MARCH
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the session today on DEATH. We shared how we had used burial records, death certificates, wills, newspaper articles, inquests and more to bring colour to the history of our ancestors , the times in which they lived and find where they are buried. Reference was made to the information sheet on Wills and Probate that is on the Family History group webpage. A copy is available on request from the Coordinato.
UPDATE FEBRUARY
We held a very interesting session on how to research the service history of an ancestor who has served in the military. There are useful links at Military Service Websites
UPDATE JANUARY
We discussed Maps - Old & New