| Status: | Active, open to new members |
| When: | Monthly on Thursday afternoons 2:00 pm-4:00 pm 1st Thursday afternoon |
| Venue: | Church of the Resurrection, Drayton |
We are a friendly group of people who share a common interest and fascination with family history, whether it be our own or someone else's!
We meet once a month at a small cost to cover the hall hire and refreshments. The room has a screen which enables us to give presentations.
"Genealogy" is much more than names, dates and places on a family tree, but also the family stories (whether they are proven true or not!), the social and historical context that our ancestors lived in, their occupations and much more beside.
Each of us has varying degrees of experience, some with very little and others with many years and we often find that our individual research takes place on a stop-start basis within our personal lives. Some of us use computers for recording our findings, some are paper based only - but even computers generate paper!
So our aim is to encourage and learn from each other, share our experience and personal research stories, pass on tips and generally give help to each other and, of course, to enable people to make new friends within the wider u3a group.
In 2023 we attended an online talk on the topic of Brick Walls which highlighted things we either didn't know or had forgotten about!
We have visited Portsmouth Dockyard, hosted by the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust which enabled us to see some of the things that the Trust has managed to save which would otherwise have been lost - definitely worth a visit.
We have talked about researching outside the UK, looking at various documents. This didn't apply to all of us but, of course, with Genealogy you never know when circumstances will change. We've had discussions on Military research and our ancestors' occupations. One of the group members gave us a talk on their Derbyshire ancestors which included a PowerPoint presentation.
We have had volunteers from the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust visit to talk about The Triangle Girls - the women who kept the Dockyard going through the Second World War as many of the men had gone to fight in the war. And another talk from the Trust was entitled A Moment In Time - a fascinating delve into the life of a certain William Floyd, sparked by the discovery of a page that had been ripped out of a 1781 ledger for works to vessels of the Fleet.
In previous years we have visited The National Archives in London, Winchester Archives, The Society of Genealogists in London, The Spring at Havant and Highland Road cemetery. We’ve done research, with the local history group, on the men who died at the Battle of Jutland and the men on the war memorial at St. Andrews church; both resulted in booklets being produced. We’ve had talks on Portsmouth, military archives, lantern slides, members' “brick walls” and The Guild of One Name Studies.
Between 2013 and 2016 we collaborated with the University of Portsmouth's Port Towns and Urban Cultures (PTUC) group to research local casualties of the Battle of Jutland. The scale of loss of men from Portsmouth and Gosport at Jutland equated to that of the "Pals" battalions at the Battle of the Somme. Click the link below to visit the resulting web pages and see full information about the project. https://porttowns.port.ac.uk/jutland-map/project.html