Spotlight on... Midland Ancestors
Jackie Cotterill introduces a busy family history society with a history that, quite unusually for such groups, goes back to the 1960s
Midland Ancestors started life in 1963 as Birmingham & Midland Society for Genealogy & Heraldry (BMSGH). In September 2017, it was thought that a new more up to date name was needed. A vote amongst our members came up with the Midland Ancestors name. The changes that had taken place since the Society was inaugurated in 1963 were beyond the scale of anybody’s imagination then. The internet had not been dreamt of and people’s research patterns had changed over the years. It was felt that the Society needed a modern persona to reflect the 21st century.
Society aims
The aims of the Society over the years have not changed; we still cover the pre-1974 counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and the West Midlands; we are still transcribing and preserving records as much as we can.
Local groups
We have several groups: Birmingham, Bromsgrove, Kenilworth, London,
North Staffs, Stourbridge and Wolverhampton, most of which, in normal circumstances, are run by their own committee and meet once a month at a local venue (apart from London who meet quarterly). Our groups host speakers, hold research evenings, and run visits to local places of interest.
We also run regular coach trips from Birmingham down to the UK National Archives at Kew and there is always plenty of help on the coach if you have not been to Kew before. This visit is open to both members and non-members.
Family history centre
We have a fully staffed Family History Centre at the Birmingham & Midland Institute in the centre of Birmingham, which is open five days per week. Our reference library contains almost 10,000 books, microfiche, microfilm, maps and computer-based resources. We also have a lending library that is open when we hold our monthly meeting.
The Centre allows access to the internet via our computers and we are also a Familysearch Affiliate Library, which allows access to an estimated 400 million+ images.
One of our major projects is helping Warwickshire County Record Office (WRCO) transcribe and index images of parish registers. WRCO provide us with copies of their parish register images which were scanned some 30-40 years ago. Volunteers here in the UK and overseas transcribe and index the images, which are available via the Society’s shop, www.bmsgh-shop. org.uk. Also available via the Society’s website are copies of other WCRO records: tithe maps and quarter session records. There is also a second-hand bookshop called Priory Books.
As part of the checking process, each page is manually viewed and any not included in the original scanning, are then scanned by WCRO and transcribed. When completed, the project will form the only complete set of Warwickshire parish register images and transcriptions on the internet.
Midland Ancestors has a collection of old Birmingham maps c.1888 which have been scanned, indexed and are for sale at our online shop. We have just acquired another collection covering North Staffordshire, which we will again scan and index.
One of our North Staffordshire group members, Rob Carter, has a project looking for lost memorials, headstones, etc where the church or chapel have been reused for something else.
We also have a variety of smaller projects run by members, transcribing parish registers, Methodist registers, monumental inscriptions, etc throughout our three counties.
Challenges and opportunities
Lockdown has presented its own problems, with all our groups and our library being closed, but it has also presented our members with a remarkable opportunity. We are now putting on online talks via Zoom to which most of our members have taken wholeheartedly. As well as members joining us from all parts of the UK, we are also seeing members (for the first time) enjoying what we do from across the World, Australia and the USA.
We have four Facebook pages: BMSGH Members only Page; Midland Ancestors DNA Special Interest Group; Midland Ancestors general page open every everybody; and a Find My Past Independent User Group page. We are also on Twitter.