Our online seminar series kicks off on Wednesday 27 January 2021 at 8pm (GMT), with a guided tour of Directories and Poll Books led by Else Churchill. Else is the genealogist at the Society of Genealogists (SOG) in London, and a member of the Guild. Her talk will focus on finding and using the long 18^th century collections held in the SOG library and will also point you to similar sources elsewhere.

These name rich resources supplement parish and other records by providing details about where your ancestors lived and worked, and who they might have worked in partnership with. This additional information can enrich and expand your family story.

Guild member Mike Kipling will host the event. Our thanks to Else and Mike for their time and support. Don’t forget to register your place, but if for any reason you can’t make it, a recording will be available on the website soon after the event.

Ancestors in Print Webinar Series

Join us on Wednesday 27 January and the following three Wednesdays for our next online seminar series, this time looking at some of the more unusual print based resources available to one-namers. Seminars will start at 8.00pm London UK time, last for one hour, and include time to ask questions.

This time we are looking at a variety of printed materials that supplement the more standard records, and provide a valuable source of evidence about aspects of our ancestors lives, both in the UK and worldwide.

More formal print records include directories and poll books. These name-rich resources can fill in some of the gaps about where our ancestors lived and worked between censuses. Business directories provide more information about their occupations and the people they worked with. If you’re lucky, a business partner’s name might ring a bell as someone who married into the family or was a witness at a wedding, all adding interest to your ancestors’ story. In our first seminar, Else Churchill from the Society of Genealogists will show us how to access their 18th century collection and suggest other places to look.

Seeing your ancestor’s name in the newspaper could mean celebrity or infamy, or they might be using simply it as a means of getting news to families back home by placing birth, marriage or death notices. Our second seminar led by Aoife O’Connor explores the wide range of newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive. In the final seminar, Michelle Patient will introduce the wide ranging newspaper collections held by National Libraries worldwide.

Many printed resources are around still more by luck than judgement. Menus, music hall programmes, postcards, adverts and much more besides that our ancestors hung on to rather than threw away, have now found their way to the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library. The librarian Julie Anne Lambert will lead our third seminar and show us how to find family names in their vast collection of printed ephemera.

Registration for all the webinars opens on Friday 15 January 2021. Just visit the Guild’s seminar page and click on the seminar title.

Each presentation will be recorded and be available to view a few days after the live event by going to the Guild’s seminar page and clicking the appropriate link. Non members will be able to view these for several weeks, after which they will be available to logged in Guild members.

Do join us for more insights into your ancestors lives!

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