Family History Society enjoys outing to county office

HINCKLEY Family History Society held their annual outing and were treated to an excellent informative evening at Warwickshire County Record Office, hosted by staff member David Hodgkinson.

A spokesperson up the story:

We were given a short history of the Record Office and the site on which it sits, and then shown around two of the strong rooms.

Laid out in one of them was a large Victorian volume of constables’ ‘Known Thieves,’ complete with photos and handwritten descriptions of the individuals, as an example of other types of records held there.

We then moved into a research room in which all of the tables were laid out with large tithe maps from various Warwickshire parishes, takes along with a large tithe applotment book, and even a tithe payments book from 1772-76. Tithes were a tax based on produce, and the maps along with the books recorded who worked what land and, therefore, what tithe they were due to pay. Maps and tithe applotment books were produced for perhaps 75% of England and Wales between 1838 and 1853.

We also heard of the work by volunteers who have transcribed the volumes of applotment books that the Warwickshire Record Office holds. These indexes are available online at: https://apps. warwickshire.gov.uk/ TitheApp/tithes/indexes, where the entries are searchable by land owner, occupier, and parish.

Visitors to the Record Office can also use a reference book to check the existence of tithe maps and applotment books in other parts of the country: ‘The Tithe Maps of England and Wales,’ by Kain and Oliver, published in 1995, which lists by county and then parish, the places for which tithe maps and/or applotment books exist.

Similar records covering the Hinckley area are available at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland at Wigston.

The society will next meet on 1 August at the Mary Forryan Centre, Leicester Road, Hinckley when speaker Malcolm Riddle will tell members about the “Origins and Decline of Leicester’s Trams”.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start. Refreshments are provided and non-members are welcome. For further details, contact 01455 612261.