| Status: | Active, open to new members |
| Leader: |
Rena King
|
| When: | Monthly on Monday afternoons |
| Venue: | TESCO Community Room |
Please note we meet every Third Monday of the month (but not on a Bank holiday) from 2.00-4.00pm in Tesco Community Room, Brookfield Centre, Cheshunt.
Future Meeting Dates
| Monday 20/10/2025 | Monday 17/11/2025 |
Everyone interested in tracing their ancestors are welcome to come along to our monthly meetings. We can help you update your old family tree using all the new records now available, just bring along any interesting certificates, pen and paper.
All welcome to come along and learn about new and updated information now available for all family historians.
Those of you who have watched “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”, the highly successful BBC One television programme tracing family histories of popular celebrities, could be excused for thinking that tracing your ancestors was a fairly easy hobby. While it can be a totally absorbing and fascinating hobby, it can also be very frustrating and demanding. You certainly need a great deal of patience employing all the skills of a detective tracking down all those elusive ancestors.
With the internet now available to everyone, thousands more records are becoming available and making family history a lot easier to access. Large Libraries and Record Offices are putting their archives online and the old adage that “old uncle Bob tried to do the family history years ago” no longer stands. There are records available out there he never would have dreamed of.
Family history embraces local and social history. Today’s emphasis on history is not about Kings and Noblemen but trying to understand and find out more about the everyday lives of our ancestors - the ordinary people, with many surprising discoveries along the way!
The Family History Fair held recently at Alexandra Palace was a huge success. Many hundreds of people attended and enjoyed browsing over 160 stalls with vast collections of family history books relating to ancestors from all over the world. Also available was various group workshops and lectures by family history professionals, especially on the “new” family history record – DNA!
Question: Assuming you are reading a reference book and want to know if, what you are looking for is listed in the book, what do you do?
Answer: You simply consult the index! Well the same applies to family history, although not all surname indexes are available online just yet.
The Civil Registration index of all births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales [GRO Index] started in 1837 and is one, if not the most, significant resource for genealogical research. Unfortunately, the surname index is no longer available in book form and can only be consulted online. However, luckily for family historians the transcribing of the GRO index is an ongoing project currently being carried out by teams of volunteers and consulting the GRO Index for the period 1837-1992 is now freely available. This means everyone is able to check out the index, for entries relating to their family at www.Freebmd.org.uk completely free of charge!
Unbelievably, the website recently reported transcribers had completed over 394,852,600 entries, so your relations are bound to be listed! If this has whetted your appetite, why not come along to our group meeting and find out more.
Another bit of good news for family historians is the General Registrar Office online at www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates, are extending their pilot scheme of issuing pdf [portable document format] copies at the cheaper rate of £6. The Indexes of births 1837-1917 [now show the mothers maiden name] and deaths 1837-1957 [now show the age at death] making it easier to order the right persons certificate, so if you have a few of these to buy now is the time to apply. They will however require the Volume and Page numbers of each individual certificate applied for and free online access to the Indexes of BMD providing this information, can be found at www.freebmd.org.uk. Many are unaware of this very useful free website, i.e. the listing of GRO Indexes to all England and Wales births, marriages and deaths. BMD indexes currently contains nearly 400 million entries. On 21st June 2024 database users did 131,697 searches. With that amount currently available, it is very unlikely the person you are looking for does not appear in the national indexes. So come along to the meeting and have another go at finding your ancestors, there are heaps of websites out there and multiplying year by year!
Please speak to the Group Leader, Rena King, at the Cheshunt U3A Monthly Meeting or contact Rena via our "Contacts" page - Enquiries on Groups.