This month saw the restart of the Warwickshire Guild members 'face-to-face' meetings for the year. I really appreciate our regional representative organising these - carrying out a one-name study can be quite a 'solitary' activity, so it is always nice to get together with other, like-minded, people. We had a good time catching up with where we are all at, either with our own studies, or with personal family history research, whichever had been taking priority recently.
One of the topics discussed in the morning was Rootstech - "the world's largest genealogy conference". I must admit, I don't watch many webinars. I should, especially having taken out a subscription to Legacy Family Tree Webinars last year, when they ran an offer, and then forgetting to cancel it for this!
But Rootstech is so huge that the schedule can be daunting. However, one advantage is that many of the recorded sessions remain available, for free, afterwards. There are also bloggers, such as Janet Few, who publish 'roundup' posts of those presentations they watched.1
So it's not difficult to narrow down a few of those talks that I’m more likely to find interesting, or useful, and after the encouragement at our local meeting, I will make more effort to watch some of these over the coming months.
One zoom talk I did manage to attend during this month was presented through Midland Ancestors, called "Posted in the Past: Stories from 20th century postcards", by Helen Baggott. I found this very helpful, because of my own little collection of PARRY postcards, which I will be doing more research on in the future.
It was during this talk that the "Historic Hospitals Admission Project" was mentioned.2 This site includes admission records for the period from 1852-1921, for four children's hospitals, one in Glasgow, the other three in London. Checking it out later, I discovered 31 entries relating to PARRYs, so that will be useful for filling in some of those family stories.
It has actually been quite a month for 'medical' records. There was a discussion on the Guild list about the St Bartholomew's hospital archives, after the hospital featured in a television programme.3
- "Surgeons' Case Books, University College London, 1836-1851" produced ten results, but only covering four individuals.- "Britain, Register Of Anaesthetics 1909-1911", contained two entries- "Britain, The Medical Registers" contained 250 entries but, since the Registers are for multiple years, many of the entries were duplications and a quick examination narrowed it down to about 35 individuals.- Likewise, the "London (and Provincial) Medical Directory", which contained 291 entries, narrowed down to just 40, once duplicates were removed. But I see even those will narrow down further because some entries, eg "A Ap H", "Augustus A H" and "Augustus Af Henry" are quite likely to relate to the same individual.
There were only a couple of databases for the UK & Ireland labelled as 'new' at Ancestry - the "Personnel of the Polish Air Force in Great Britain, 1940-1947" which, as one might imagine, contained zero PARRY entries, and the "Shropshire, England, Electoral Registers and Poll Books, 1676-1954", which contained so many that I wouldn't even contemplate collecting them. (19,386, if you really want to know. ☺)
But, like all electoral rolls, those could be very useful for anyone tracing specific PARRY families in Shropshire.
Among the databases noted as "updated" on Ancestry were Find a Grave, the marriage index on Newspapers.com, the "UK and Ireland, Obituary Index, 2004-Current", and the PCC Wills, all very useful.
Another interesting site was mentioned on the Guild list, that of the marriage index of the "Clark County Clerk's Office",4 which includes marriages in Las Vegas. For a one-name study, information is collected world-wide anyway, but it is worth noting that, sometimes, people from the UK travel out to get married in places, such as Las Vegas.
However, since there are 658 PARRY entries in the database, I don't think I shall be following many of them up at the moment. ☺
March is "Women's History Month". So I thought I ought to include at least a little bit about one specific woman. But, having 'randomly' picked one of the ladies who appears in the "College Of Preceptors, Student Registers And Diploma Examinations, 1881-1931" - Kate Helen PARRY, who appears three times, in 1893 (when she passed English, History and Geography, but failed Arithmetic), 1895 (failed Theory & Practice, Arithmetic again, and also French), and finally, in 1896, (when she passed those three, and was awarded her diploma, on the 25 July 1996) - I then discovered that she was one of the daughters of Julius Colston PARRY, and that her story is likely to be much more interesting than the brief time left this month to research it.
So that's another story that will have to wait for now.
Notes & Sources
https://thehistoryinterpreter.com/2026/03/07/rootstech-roundup-part-2/
https://thehistoryinterpreter.com/2026/03/08/rootstech-roundup-part-3/
2. The "Historic Hospitals Admission Project" : https://hharp.org/
4. Clark County Clerk's Office marriage index search page: https://clerk.clarkcountynv.gov/AcclaimWeb/Marriage/FindMyMarriageRecordSearch
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