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Past Meetings Archive |
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11th April 2000 9th May 2000 13th June 2000 11th July 2000 12 September 2000 9 October 2000 J.M. Greenstreet IGI 15 November 2000 12 December 2000 9 January 2001 13 February 2001 13 March 2001 Branch AGM Sylvia McKean Gypsy Ancestry 8 May 2001 12 June 2001 10 July 2001
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 Kent Family
History Society
Deal and District Branch |
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This page will contain reports of previous branch meetings and events as information becomes available. Where possible, speakers' notes and other materials from the talks have been included. Details of future meetings can be found here. 11th April 2000 Around 90 KFHS members and guests packed the Cleary Hall for the inaugural meeting, despite the cold and wet weather. Twelve new members signed up to the Society. The Chairman of the Society opened the meeting and supervised the election of the Branch Committee (for details of the Committee, click here) before handing over to the new Branch Chairman to introduce the speaker. Mrs. Meryl Catty gave an interesting and informative talk, based around her own research, with plenty to interest beginners and experienced family historians. An outline of the topics covered in the talk has been reproduced here. Meryl very kindly allowed the Society to record this talk, which is available on loan to members through the Network 11 Tape Library. "It is an ideal introduction to family history and is highly recommended to all new members of the Society who are just starting out to trace their ancestry." (Ed. - KFHS Journal June 2000) Members of the newly-elected committee were on hand before and after the meeting to offer help and advice to new researchers. Around 50 members and guests heard Mrs. Julia Page give her talk entitled "From Wellesley to Wellington". A very interesting talk, but more "history" than "family history". Around 50 members and guests gathered to hear Alison Cable give a most interesting talk about her job as an archivist and about the new East Kent Archive Centre at Whitfield. The Centre is part of the County Record Office network for Kent, the other centres being at County Hall, Maidstone, and Canterbury Cathedral. It houses archive materials (non parochial) for the Thanet, Dover and Shepway areas around the coast of East Kent, from Margate to Romney Marsh. Although currently only open one day a week (Tuesday), they hope to increase this to two days by the end of the year. Ms Cable and her team (two archivists and two assistants) are busy behind the scenes cataloguing and conserving the archive materials, which are gradually being transferred from Maidstone and from various local collections. They are currently engaged in rescuing the Lydd town records from the Town Hall loft! Local archives are not generally useful as a primary source for family historians; it is only after you have traced your ancestors through the civil and parochial registers that you will want to "put some meat on the bones" of your family tree. This is where the local archives can help, with their extensive collections of local information. With the kind permission of Ms Cable, we have reproduced here two leaflets produced by the Centre: A Brief Guide to Collections and Planning a Visit. Members of the committee and other volunteers were on hand to offer help and advice and members were able to consult the 1999 and 2000 editions of the GRD as well as microfiche relating to Deal. Cliff Cole, Thanet Branch chairman, gave a very entertaining talk entitled "I don't believe it!", in which he demonstrated using examples from his own research that, if you can't find the person you are looking for, you are probably looking for the wrong name, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Many of the records that we rely upon for our research contain anomalies (aka errors) of various kinds. Cliff showed how, in one family, as many as four different birth dates could be got for each member by referring to the 1851 census, the 1881 census, the parish registers and the IGI. He also demonstrated how, in a small parish, the vicar could spell a person's name four different ways on one page of the register. These and other examples, presented in a humorous way, gave us permission to disbelieve what we find in the various sources and encouraged us to be patient in trying to find our ancestors. Gillian Willett, KFHS librarian, gave a brief talk about the resources available to members of the Society. Members were invited to bring along their questions and problems for discussion and to consult the various resources provided by the committee and other members. We now have 2 microfiche readers for use at the meetings and will be purchasing various records on fiche. If you have any suggestions for possible inclusion in our stock, please contact one of the Committee with your "wants list". Mr. Paul Blake gave a very interesting and informative talk on using photographs and visual aids in your family history research. He illustrated his talk with a large number of photographs from his own family collection and others, showing how we can easily be fooled into thinking that pictures are relevant when they are actually unrelated to the families that owned them. Mr. J.M.Greenstreet from the LDS Centre in Canterbury gave us a talk about the facilities and research materials available at the Canterbury Centre. Mr. Colin Allen gave us a fascinating and amusing account of his quest for information about the family of Cuffey, a West Indian slave, illustrated with examples from the various records that were used in his search, including newsletters, parish registers and prison records. Dr Stansfield has left the Canterbury Cathedral Archives to take up a post at Oxford University; we would like to wish him every success in his new position. His place was taken by Miss Cressida Annesley, who gave a very informative talk about the Archives and their use by family and local historians. She outlined the work that is carried out by the archivists and conservators at the Cathedral and gave us a brief, illustrated, guide to the numerous collections held at the centre. Good job it's wasn't a Friday! After a number of technical difficulties (and no small measure of panic on the part of your's truly), your webmaster's talk was very well received (whew!) by an attentive and appreciative audience. The talk outlined briefly what the Internet is, what is available in terms of research materials on the web and how we have used it in our own research. It also tried to point out some of the advantages and pitfalls of using the Internet for genealogical research. It was a very personal view of using the Internet for research, aimed at people with little or no experience of using the Internet. The talk was illustrated with a number of examples from the speaker's own research. Due to the large number of photographs and other images involved, the talk would not be suitable for inclusion on this site (the presentation, in MS PowerPoint, is approximately 45MB). Michael Gandy will be well-known to many Society members as one of the longest-serving members of the KFHS (membership no. 3). His talk, about the problems involved in London ancestry, was very lively and entertaining. He explained how, over the centuries, people migrated (and, to a certain extent, still migrate) along a series of axes from the central parts of London to the outer suburbs, following major road and rail links out of the city. He also showed how, and why, unlike in the countryside, there would often be two or more families living almost next door to each other with the same, not particularly common name, who were totally unrelated. The significance of people's work to the areas in which they lived was also explained. The first Annual General Meeting of the Deal Branch was held in April. As no volunteers were forthcoming, the existing committee was re-elected unopposed for another year. In the absence of any volunteer speakers from the membership, a short talk on the subject of Gypsy ancestry was given by Sylvia McKean. This was at the request of a number of members. Else Churchill of the Society of Genealogists gave a talk about using libraries for research. This was another open session for members to bring along their questions and problems for discussion and to consult the various resources provided by the committee and other members. Local historian and branch member Les Cozens gave a short, interesting - and often amusing - account of his memories of Deal as a boy in the 1930s. Branch member Ted Maynard gave us a talk about how he got started on his family history, dedicated to his wife, Jean, who died recently.
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