FAMILY HISTORY
page prepared by Peter Tipton, March 2009
There are many opportunities for family historians to glean information from this site, and to contribute new information to it. It is intended that the short list of biographies already on this site will be expanded to include the prominent people who lived in this sub-region, shaped its future, and were involved in the changes to its landscape and economics. We also want to include some of those at the bottom end of the social scale who were swept up in the changes from the barren heathland, through the coming of the railways and the military, to the thriving towns and villages of today.
For those who have traced back their ancestry in this area to Stuart, and even Elizabethan times, links to their ancestors may be found in the biographies of the post-mediaeval Borderware potters. A new project initiated by the North East Hampshire Historical & Archaeological Society (NEHHAS) will link the studies of pre-1700 Borderware potters to those working in Borderware potteries from 1700 to before WW1. As this research develops many more family historians are likely to find links to their ancestors.
As a personal project I am researching the family histories of those people who were in some way connected to a single working farm in Yateley, Monteagle Farm. The Monteagle Project is an intensive pilot of a broader project the Yateley Society has had under way for some time with family historians contacting its own websites. I am working out family trees of everyone who appears in the 1841-1901 Yateley census whose abode contains the word "monteagle" in its variant spellings and including owners (ie the copyholders), the occupiers (ie bailiffs and farmers) given in the census and tithe map, and the farm workers. There was quite a turnover in each of these categories on this one farm, so I want to find out where they came from and where they went off to. I also want to find out who were their relations in the immediate community in order to build up a picture of social inter-relationships in Yateley at various social levels, and to find out how far these relationships extended geographically at various social levels.