Starting Family History courses available

29th August 2013

One of the most popular reasons for people to come to The Hive and use our resources is family history, which is very popular. Whether it is triggered by watching the latest series of Who Do You Think You Are?, discovery of old photos or letters, a conversation with relatives or simple curiosity we are used to people coming to us to trace their family history.

Here on level 2 in The Hive we can provide access via computer to census information and civil registration (birth, marriage and death) indexes for England and Wales and well as some other sources. If your ancestors are from Worcestershire we can help even more as we have parish registers, wills, marriage licences, trade directories, and newspapers for the county, as well as archives covering schools, local estates and hospitals. A guide to what we have and some tips for getting started can be found here.

To help you get started we will be running a number of courses in the autumn for anyone interested in tracing their family history.

We will offering two 8-week courses in Starting Family History, in partnership with Worcester College of Technology, running on Tuesday mornings from 24th September and Wednesday evenings from 25th September. These will teach you the basics of how to go about starting your family tree, as well as explaining about the main sources you’ll use, such as census, civil registration, parish registers and wills. Useful for anyone wanting to begin family history, it will also be helpful for those who have begun but want to know a bit more about the sources, how to understand them and how to get the most out of them. As the course takes place in The Hive there will be opportunity to put your learning into practice by using the resources of on the Explore the Past floor. The course costs £95 and should be booked through the College on 01905 725594/743456 or www.wortech.ac.uk.

We’ll also be repeating our popular Ancestry.co.uk workshops on Thursday mornings in September and October. The three workshops, which can be booked individually or together, begins with the census and an introduction to using the website. The second workshop goes beyond the census to the next most commonly used sources on the website. The third workshop focuses on what has been added over the past 2 years. Each workshop begins with a presentation and explanation of the different historic sources, and examples of searching on the big screen, before moving onto the computers for you to have a go yourself at searching on the website. Workshops are £6 each and need to be booked in advance via explorethepast@worcestershire.gov.uk, at the desk, or by phone 01905 766352.

On the first Wednesday’s and Saturday we have one hour induction tours which take you round the different resources we have here with in the Explore the Past area in The Hive. These cost £5 and again should be booked in advance via explorethepast@worcestershire.gov.uk, at the desk, or by phone 01905 766352.

So if you’ve decided that you’d like to make a start of your family tree, or to restart after a break, we hope to see you soon.