Macclesfield Group

Unfortunately due to ill health  the advertised speaker has had to cancel his talk. The meeting of the Macclesfield group on Tuesday 25th April will now be a Virtual Tour of Macclesfield with Howard & Rosie Rowley.

The Macclesfield group of the Family History Society of Cheshire will be hosting

A demonstration of TWILE by Kelly Marsden one of its founders.

Twile is a timeline of everything that's ever happened in your family. It pulls together all of your family history, memories, photos and stories in the same place which all the family can explore and add to.

This will take place on 23rd May 2017 starting at 2.00pm at The Salvation Army Church, Roe Street, Macclesfield SK11 6XD (Entrance on Wellington Street, opposite the Churchill Way Car Park.)

All members of the society are welcome although booking is essential as places are limited – please email  to book a place.

To get the most out of the demonstration you need to bring a laptop, ipad or similar device.

We will be on the North West Group stand and also represented by Federation of Family History Societies.  David Lambert, Sharon and Ian Hartas, Rosie Rowley, Geoff Johnson and myself will be present on the stand on occasions during the 3 days. If anyone wants to have a chat about their research we will be willing to advise.

Regards

David Smetham (Chairman)

The next Blo(o)r(e) society meeting will take place on Saturday 29th April at:

The Church Hall of St. Mark's, Basford
211, Basford Park Road, Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, ST5 0PG

pdf Bloore Society April 29th 2017 (102 KB)

 A Computer Club's March meeting  is on Monday 13th March - a joint meeting with Northwich Group on DNA.

We'll be back to our normal `second Tuesday' in April

Geoff J

Great news!

You can now join the FHSC, renew your membership and upgrade membership via the website.

Check out the Changelog for all the details.

RootsTech,  based out of Salt Lake City,  is the largest Family History event held each year in the United States.  There are more than 200 sessions and I would love to go one year. Fortunately several of these sessions are now available via their website: https://www.rootstech.org/

EE, the company that took over Orange, has announced that all of the email addresses associated with Orange and Freeserve are to be closed in May. The addresses are those which end in any of the following:

Orange.net

Orangehome.co.uk

Wanadoo.co.uk

Freeserve.co.uk

Fsbusiness.co.uk

Fslife.co.uk

Fsmail.net

Fsworld.co.uk

Fsnet.co.uk

I am aware that a number of our members will be affected by this. Please ensure you check your email address on My Subscription and update it with a replacement.

Today we launch an accessibility tool that will aid those with eyesight difficulties to  use the website.

It includes features to allow contrast and font size to be changed.

It also provides the capability for any text that has been highlighted to be read aloud.

You will access the tool via the new blue Screen Reader icon in the bottom right of all screens.

Clicking on it will bring up the full menu of options.

You can add comments to this news item to give feedback on its usability. It has a number of options to change the configuration but I obviously need feedback from those with sight difficulties in order to assess its effectiveness.

NOTE - The Birkenhead Group of the Family History SOciety of Cheshire is no longer meeting. It was formally closed on the 29th January at the Quarterly Meeting of the FHSC Committee. If you have any queries then please contact the FHSC Chairman via Contact Us in the top menu bar.

The webmaster has already changed your affiliation to 'Unattached' from Birkenhead.

Members can use My Subscription to change their affiliation to a different local group or leave it set it to Unattached.

Today I have launched a new item on the My Membership menu call My Newsletter Archive.

You are able to get to all the newsletters you have ever received, even if you have subsequently unsubscribed.

A great use for this feature is you can check if a newsletter that arrives via email is actually valid. If its not on the archive it didnt come from us.

Many of you will have recently received a number of emails and newsletters from us.

Some of you, including committee members, are rightly concerned that these may not have come from your society - especially as the old site was less able to send emails.

I have written the first of a series of help information in order to allay fears and provide you information to help you decide whether the emails you receive are genuine.

You will find these accessable via the FAQ menu in the top menu or by clicking HERE.

They can be found in the Security category.

Please keep checking back as I will add a number of others over the next week.

The new Sale group of the FHSC has now been officially formed, has a committee and has held its first meeting.

UPDATE - The group now has its own pages on this website but they need to be finalised for content.

Unfortunately we did have some teething problems with Contact Us emails not being received.

The sytem is now back and working but ................

If you have already used Contact Us and not received a reply then please resend your query to the same person again.

North Cheshire Family History Society is being wound up and the following statement is taken from their website:

"We regret that owing to insufficient support the Society is being wound up. New memberships are not being accepted. Existing memberships expired at the end of 2016. Our last meetings were in November 2016. Our last ever issue of the North Cheshire Family Historian, for November, has been published.

A number of existing members from the Sale Branch plan to form a new Group within the Family History Society of Cheshire.

An inaugural meeting of this Group will take place at the usual venue:
Trinity Church Hall, Trinity Rd, Sale, M33 3ED
at 7.30 pm on Wednesday 11th January 2017
It will be followed by 
'Big Trees from Little Acorns Grow - A round trip with the seed man from Sale, Samuel Ryder', by Liz de Mercado.
If you are interested, please come along and bring any friends or neighbours."

As a concession (to equalise the 6 month differential between NCFHS and FHSC membership renewal dates) ex NCFHS members wishing to join the FHSC may do so at any time before 1st July 2017 and be given full membership through to 1st July 2018. 

All ex NCFHS members will receive complimentary printed copies of Cheshire Ancestor for the December 2016, March and June 2017 issues and may visit both our research centres and any FHSC group meetigs during this period, being admitted as honorary FHSC members. 

We hope to offcially create and formalise the new SALE Group after the above meeting, when Ex North Cheshire members will be offered temporary membership of FHSC until they choose to opt in or out of full membership with the transitional benefits mentioned above.

I have just fixed an issue whereby the Forgotten Password facility was incorrectly thinking you were a robot attacking the site.

Please notify me if any errors persist of this type after 22:45 on 31st December.

Regards

Alan 

Non-members can now register so they can use the replacement Cheshire Surnames that was very popular. Click HERE to register.

Once you are registered go to My Membership on the main menu to find the Surnames facilities.

Please provide feedback on the facility by adding comments to this blog (only visible once you are logged in).

If you opt to become a fully paid up member the you can add and search members' surname interests worldwide.

This is quite a new feature and it will become progressively more useful as members continue to add the names they are researching.

For those of you looking to read the digital version of Cheshire Ancestor then login and you will find a direct link to all the Cheshire Ancestors in the dark green menu bar.

Now that our new site is up and running all our members will have to reset their passwords to access Members Only content.

Click on Login in the top green menu and then use the Forgot Your password? link. On the next screen which opens you should enter your email address and then click on submit. Be aware that the Submit button only works after a number of seconds (his is to protect us from attacks by robots).

Now go to your email inbox and look for an email from us. If you cant find it then check in your junk/spam folder. If you dont receive it then please contact the Web Administrator via Contact Us.

Also contact us if your email address is rejected as it means our records need updating.

If you do get the email then click on the link which will take you back directly to our website to reset your password.

Please make this a strong password: at least 8 characters long with a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols

Once you have logged in you can look at the data we hold about you that may need changing.  You will find it in the My Membership menu under the Member Admin options.

Good Luck! and Welcome to our New Website.  This is not a static website and we will continue to add to it and increase facilties throughout 2017.

I am the administrator of a project investigating the genetic relationships between male holders of the Bracey name and it’s variants. We have recently found a cluster of Bracey/Bracy chaps in the USA who are all the genetic descendants of William Bressee of Isle of Wight County, Virginia in the seventeenth century. 
 
 The Bracey surname is historically found in three locations in England, South Gloucestershire, Cheshire and Norfolk (apart from a London population from at least 1600 that are considered likely migrants, possibly from all three of those counties). We know that the South Gloucestershire family are genetically distinct from that of the Virginia patriarch and our group would like to probe the relationship between the Cheshire Bressy/Bracey family and these two clusters.