Treasure of the Month

The Society holds a vast collection of will indexes and other probate materials? In fact, a booklet created in 1996 detailing our holdings in this area ran to over 160 pages! Learn more on what you might discover in this month’s Treasures series, available to catch up on here on YouTube.

Join us on 11th June to catch the next Treasures session, book your FREE ticket to attend the Zoom in real time! Discover Family papers, letters, and Diaries in the SoG’s Document Collections.

Tips from inside the SoG

We’ve hand-picked some genealogy gold to share with you from our talks, socials, staff and member conversations. We live, eat and breathe family history - so there are always plenty of gems for us to select and share:

• John Hanson reminded members taking part in our regular Brick Wall Busting session that the only thing you can really trust on a birth certificate is the date of registration and the name of the registrar! In theory, anything else can be wrong or made up. Certainly, food for thought.
• Richard Holt during his talk on chairmaking ancestors showcased Bernard D. Cotton’s The English Regional Chair. Not only does the book include lots of illustrations, but it also includes a fantastic index of chairmakers and turners spanning several 100 years. A must check for anyone with ancestors working in this profession.
• In Nichola Court’s detailed exploration of the Old Poor Law, she explained that the 1697 Settlement Act required those receiving relief to wear a blue cloth embroidered with red letters. This was known as ‘badging’. Failure to wear the badge could result in punishment, and Overseers could be fined for not enforcing the wearing of the badge.

 All the talks and sessions mentioned in our tips sections are available in our Gold Members library. Join today and you’ll have access to the whole back catalogue of over 100 recordings. Find out more here.

Book our Researching 17th Century Ancestors with Else Churchill summer school by Friday 14 June to qualify for exciting Early Bird Extras. This five-day online Summer School with Else Churchill and Dr Johnathan Healey will help you take your research back to the 1600s. Plus enjoy an optional evening group brainstorm – chat 17th-century genealogy with likeminded people over a glass of wine.

Professional Genealogist? Thinking about becoming one? Then our Professional Corner is for you. Watch live on Zoom or catch up with recordings in the Gold Members library. In June, Mia Bennett joins us to explore DNA services, and what you need to consider if you are providing them. And what you need to know if you aren’t.

We celebrate Pride with several talks exploring diversity and equality this month, from exploring the life of Anne Lister and men caught up in a 1921 trial to considering homosexuality during WWI, the treatment of immigrants, to delving into the history of democracy, women in Parliament and the fight for suffrage.

Discover the full events listing here.

June’s Book of the Month: My Ancestors Were Gypsies by Sharon Sillers Floate (3rd ed., 2010)

There is a long-standing belief in family history circles that if you discover you have gypsy ancestry you may as well abandon your search at once. This book by Sharon Sillers Floate, who has been specialising in the subject since 1992, suggests otherwise.

Sharon provides readers with an invaluable, easy-to-read guide to trace their gypsy ancestors. Plus, she covers the fascinating social history of gypsies in Britain.

The usual cost of My Ancestor Were Gypsies is £8.99 and is currently available to SoG members at the discounted price of £7.19 (£8.09) to non-members). A £2.75 postal charge applies within the UK, check our website for postal rates outside the UK.

This book plus the full range of titles published by the Society is available from our bookshop through our website. Offer valid until 30 June 2024.

Series Seven of The Family Histories Podcast begins on 7 May 2024, with another seven fascinating guests, each with a life story they’ve uncovered, and a pesky brick wall to solve. In this series, we’ll hear about a secretive granny, a priestly lover, a courageous sailor, a political poet, a merchant seaman, a Resistance member, and a magnificent aunt.

Joining host Andrew Martin are; Jackie Kohnstamm, Dave Annal, Todd Lucero Sales, Marie Cappart, Dai Davies, Scott Fisher, and Morag Peers. The show is freely available from wherever you get your podcasts.

Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland This website is dedicated to how places were presented, imagined, and described, in the poetry of premodern Scotland (medieval and early modern periods, c. 1400-1700). It is a collaboration between the National Library of Scotland and the University of Bristol, and the result of a British Academy Midcareer Fellowship on 'Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland' held by Sebastiaan Verweij in 2023/24.

TheGenealogist makes it easy to locate an ancestor geographically in the 1851 census. With a choice of historical and modern georeferenced maps, this makes it simple to explore the place where your ancestors lived and discover their surroundings. TheGenealogist has been working through its census collection, linking the records to the detailed map collections on its Map Explorer™.

TheGenealogist has also released 225,395 heads of households and property owners from the 1910-1915 Lloyd George Domesday Survey, covering the county of Surrey. The coverage of these IR 58 records now includes all the boroughs of Greater London plus Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Northamptonshire and with this release, Surrey.