As some of you may be aware, some time ago, the old B1NS committee made the decision to undertake a systematic search of parish records in the Frome Valley area to the east of Hereford. It was hoped that any new findings might provide the missing information to establish links between member’s family trees that are known to exist from results of DNA tests that have been undertaken. 

 

To achieve this, the expertise of a local professional researcher was employed, funded from the society research fund, to work on this project part-time. This research has focused on a search of church records looking at baptisms, marriages, marriage banns and burials from the start of records up to and including the year 1851. Where church records are incomplete, Bishops Transcript records have been used to supplement in an endeavour to ensure all available information has been transcribed. We are pleased to announce that the original 39 parishes identified in this first tranche of the project (together with an additional 6 Hereford City parishes added later) have all been searched, and information pertaining to the Badham surname and associated variants transcribed.

 

The backdrop to this work is that the information held in parish record databases on the old Society portal has been gathered over the years from a variety of sources but much has come from sources such as IGI 1992 and the National Burial Index, both generally recognised as being incomplete. Therefore, as part of this project, all information identified has been checked against current records, new information entered and current records amended/ updated to reflect that it has been identified as part of the project. All of the 46 parishes have now been updated on the portal and this has resulted in a substantial amount of new information particularly from early records (pre 1650) and many new burials being added.

 

All updated parishes have been identified on the chart contained in the linked PDF file (see below) which provides detailed information about the record source (Church or Bishops Transcript), coverage and also details of records where no Badham (including variants) have been identified. The latter will hopefully enable members to 'rule out' certain parishes when it comes to their own research. All new and updated records are referenced by ‘HEFGP’ in the ‘Correspondent’ column of the record.

Click HERE to view/download the PDF file containing the chart... You will notice this now contains a great deal of detail (plus added notes), with the consequence that the whole chart is larger and some rows have had to be expanded beyond a single line. Hopefully (with the aid of a large ruler, magnifying glass etc) it's still broadly legible!