LECTURE SERIES: Sources for Local and Family Historians

The second of a series of workshops by Stuart A Raymond, the other date is 3 June 2017.
Cost per workshop £12 non-members (£10 WANHS members)

The Parish Chest: Parish Officers and their Records – Saturday 6 May 2017.
Before the nineteenth century, the parish was the basic unit of local government. Parish officers were involved in a wide range of activities – maintaining the church, providing poor relief, arresting offenders, maintaining the roads, and even eradicating vermin. Their archives were stored in parish chests, and included churchwardens’ accounts, poor law papers, apprenticeship indentures, vestry minutes, tithe papers, glebe terriers, Easter books, inventories of church goods, seating plans, enclosure awards, and a wide range of other documents, as well as the ubiquitous parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. This workshop will outline the activities of the parish officers, provide an introduction to their documents, and explain how they can be used for research in local and family history.

Justices of the Peace and Quarter Sessions: Records of County Governance – Saturday 3 June 2017.
Justices of the Peace, sitting in Quarter Sessions, governed the English counties from the fourteenth until the nineteenth centuries. They left behind them a huge accumulation of documents – order books, recognizances, presentments, settlement certificates, removal orders, registers of gamekeepers and various other occupations, calendars of prisoners, accounts of county funds, to name just a few. These documents are invaluable sources of information for family and local historians. This workshop will explain how Quarter Sessions and Justices of the Peace operated, and how their records can be used by researchers.

Each session will run from 2pm.

Stuart Raymond studied history and politics at Keele, and librarianship at Aberystwyth, before becoming librarian of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in 1974. In the 1980s he worked in a number of Australian academic libraries, and completed an Adelaide University master’s degree based on Cornish probate records, before returning to the UK in 1990. Since then, he has written numerous handbooks, bibliographies, and web directories for family and local historians. Recent publications have included Words from Wills, The Wills of our Ancestors, Tracing your ancestors’ parish records, and Tracing your Ancestors in County Records. He has just edited a new edition of Jeremy Gibson’s Probate jurisdictions, which is now due for publication. He currently tutors a number of online genealogical courses with Pharos. Most of these workshops have previously been delivered at the Society of Genealogists in London.

Booking:
Essential.

(1) Telephone – 01380 727369