A POP-UP display at Chester Market will give visitors and residents the chance to look back on the history of the city's iconic Browns department store and contribute to a growing archive.
Staff from Cheshire Archives, Cheshire West and Chester Museums and the University of Chester will be showcasing some of the objects, photos and documents they hold from the store
Members of the public are encouraged to come along and view these treasures, and share some of their own memories and personal items from Browns of Chester.
Maccesfield Museums are devastated to report the Silk Museum was broken into on morning of 2nd August around 5am.
On top of the thieves creating a huge amount of damage to the museum building, they have smashed the donations box and taken public donations as well as stealing 2 medals awarded to Charles Tunnicliffe:
Gold Medal - awarded to Charles Tunnicliffe for his services to bird protection by the Royal Society of the protection of birds in 1975.
OBE - awarded to Charles Tunnicliffe for service to the arts.
On the centenary year of Charles Tunnicliffe this a callous act and is a huge blow to the museum in what is already a difficult year.
Please share these images of the medals far and wide, FHSC hope that they can be returned soon.
The Silk Museum a great home for Macclesfield's past and a great space for Macclesfield's present and future.
To help in anyway at all then please click on the link below
Helen Johnson, Professor of Criminology at the University of Hull and Professor Heather Shore, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University speaking on focussing on their research into criminal ancestors.
Melanie Backe-Hansen, a historian specialising in house histories who was involved in the recent BBC programmes ‘A house through time’, speaking on her research on house histories
David Annal, speaking about his research focussing on the impact of illegitimacy on the records our ancestors leave behind and the ways in which they are recorded.
For full programme details and how to register please click on the link below
Explore 450 years of Scottish family milestones with millions of new parish registers
Find My Past have published over 10 million new baptism, marriage and burial records, creating the largest collection of Scottish family history records available online.
This vast new collection of 'Old Parish Registers' to the site is in collaboration with local archives and organisations across Scotland.
Click on the link below to read all the details on this major new records release.
To make things much fairer for members joining at any time during the year, from now on everyone joining will receive a full year's membership, so if you join on say September 13th you membership will not renew until 12th September the following year.
Also if you chose to pay via PayPal you can now join/renew with a recurring payment without having to remember each year. You will, of course, get plenty of warning in case you wish to cancel your membership.
But, we will be running an exciting series of Seminars, totally free to members from the Autumn so your member benefits will become even more valuable so it is unlikely that you will want to.
Keep coming back to this website for more news and offers.
Here are the key announcements fron the RootsTech2022 team:
• Next year's RootsTech will take place March 3–5, 2022. • RootsTech 2022 will be entirely virtual and FREE. • While we won't be seeing each other at RootsTech London 2021, we look forward to seeing you online at RootsTech 2022. • Call for content (presentations and exhibitors) is opening soon. • You can receive updates all year long by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
More than one million Jameson employee records have been released and are now free to access online for the month of July.
Irish Distillers, producer of some of the world’s best-loved Irish whiskeys, and Ancestry, the global leader in family history, have worked together to share the Jameson employee records online.
The historic Jameson Distillery Bow Street records, which are part of the Irish Distillers archive, contain detailed weekly wages books and include the employee names, as well as occupation, hours worked, and wages paid, spanning over 100 years from 1862 to 1969.
The Jameson Distillery at Bow Street closed as an operational distillery in Dublin in the 1970s and production moved to Midleton, but today, the lives of its ‘Barrelmen’ can be explored through these digitised wage books – a potential treasure trove of information for those researching their Irish family history.
The records are thought to be important for many reasons, but mainly because for many of those listed in the earlier volumes, there is no other surviving administrative record of their lives.
Civil registration of births only began in 1864, so many may not have had birth certificates, and later records were destroyed in the bombing of the Four Courts in 1922.
The records also show further insight into life in Ireland within the period covered. During the Easter Rising in 1916, the distillery on Bow Street was taken over by the rebels which meant no staff could get to work. By law, that meant the employer did not have to pay them. However, there is a note in the wage book to say: ‘Rebellion in Dublin, all employees paid full week.’
Commenting on the release of the records online, Archivist at Irish Distillers, Carol Quinn said: “I have always tried to answer any genealogical query that I receive. However, physically looking through the volumes – some of which are half a metre in size – isn’t good for the longevity of the records and leads to damage.
"Thanks to Ancestry and the team who came to Midleton to digitise the volumes, all of the records are available online and people can look up the records themselves and find out if their relatives worked at Jameson Distillery Bow Street and what their working life was like.”
Records in the collection span from 1862-1969, but records that hold personal details are only available to view up to 1937, to protect the privacy of any living people.
MyHeritage is offering free access to all immigration and travel records from June 24–28, 2021
The Immigration & Travel category on MyHeritage encompasses 57 collections with 181,280,020 historical records from all over the world.
They include passenger arrival records, naturalization records, border crossings, emigration records, passports, and convict transportation records.
If you haven't already, you'll need to sign up for a free account, no need to give an financial information, just name and a contact email address and set a password etc
Society of Genealogists: new premises announcement
The Society of Genealogists has announced it has given notice to the landlords at its current premises, with the details of the final days available to visitors released.
In an announcement on its website The Society of Genealogists (SoG) chairman Ed Percival, writes that as part of a ‘once in a generation’ transformation, the society will be moving to a new home sooner than originally thought.
Whilst the new address hasn’t yet been announced, SOG is ‘focusing on staying in London’ and will be closing its doors for a few months after the final opening day for members at Charterhouse Buildings on 17 July 2021.
The announcement also states that people will be invited to join the society’s new membership system in early July and, with the launch of a new website, be able to enjoy full access to SoG data online.
To read the full announcment follow the link below
Today marks the beginning of Chester Heritage Festival
Running between 18 Jun, 09:00am until 28 Jun, 21:00pm, this year the Chester Heritage Festival takes on a new format determined by the coronavirus pandemic. Some live events will take place, Government ‘road-map’ permitting, but there is a tremendous amount to explore from your own home via this new website. Everything you need to know about events, live or on-line, is here.
So, whether you are interested in our Roman amphitheatre, shipbuilding on the River Dee, Chester’s workhouse or Thomas Brassey, the great Victorian railway builder, it’s all here for you to see. Delve into Chester’s heritage, learn something new about our past and enjoy the experience!
New Library Lookup Service from FamilySearch —For When You Can’t Visit the Family History Library
The Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City, Utah, has long been a go-to place to find genealogical research materials and is the flagship library for FamilySearch International.
With the closure of the library a year ago due to the COVID 19 pandemic, people have had to rely largely on online materials, unable to access records that are only viewable at the Family History Library or other locations.
A new Library Lookup Service will soon provide greater access to these records globally.
