| Date | Subject of Talk - Speaker |
|---|---|
| Thu 14th May 2026 | Members’ Forum: Family History Tourism |
| Thu 11th June 2026 | Cadwallader Bates By Christine Hanley & Glenice Reid |
| Thu 9th July 2026 | Members’ Forum: TBA |
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 12 March 2026
Attended by : 8 Members + 2 guests
Members’ Forum Formal Portraits and Family Occasions
Several members and guests had brought a wide variety of photographs – some on paper, some digital – which were shared with the group. It was noted that in the early days of photography, formal studio portraits were all that was available to ordinary people. Later types of photograph were typically of weddings, christenings and, of course, school photographs.
One guest had team photographs of professional football clubs from the late 1910s (Newcastle United, Sheffield United) featuring her husband’s grandfather, together with similar pictures of his father and uncle in a local amateur club, then her husband in another amateur team in the 1960s.
More than one member had photographs showing four generations of their family, and some of the photos showed the same individuals over the decades. One common theme was that the full detail of some of the images was not known – another reminder of the need to talk to family members about the details, and to take notes!
The changing fashions and social conventions over the past century and a half were amply illustrated in what was an interesting and enjoyable meeting.
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 12 February 2026
Attended by : 7 Members + 3 guests
Anthea Lang – Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside!
Anthea gave a very entertaining talk with an array of photographs from the early days of the British seaside holiday tradition. The Romans had introduced the idea that bathing in spring water was a good thing to do around 2,000 years ago, but the practice fell away until the 19th Century, when spa towns started to be promoted as places to visit and enjoy the health benefits of “taking the waters”. Harrogate led the way in this.
Bathing in the sea was made popular by the Prince Regent in the early 19th Century and Brighton was probably the first seaside resort – patronised by wealthy and aristocratic patrons. The less well-off were soon being catered for by places like Margate. The mid 19th century saw changes in employment law which meant that the working classes were entitled to holidays. The advent of railway travel at about the same time allowed resorts like Blackpool to provide the masses from the industrial North with the chance to go to the seaside for days out or for the whole of their week’s annual holiday.
In order to cater for the entertainment of the large numbers of visitors, seaside towns developed promenades, leisure piers and funfairs. Where beaches were hard to reach because of cliffs, Victorian engineers developed lifts, funicular railways and tramways – some of which are still in use today. Once on the beach, swimming in the sea (or just plodging) became popular. Bathing huts – changing rooms on wheels, drawn into and out of the water by horses or donkeys – allowed ladies to change into their wooden bathing costumes and go for a swim with maximum modesty.
Outdoor sea water swimming pools – such as the now-derelict one at Tynemouth – were offered, and some towns had indoor swimming baths filled with sea water. Funfairs offered things like heater shelters, “shuggy boats”, Punch and Judy shows and roller coasters, while donkey rides were available on the sands.
Most of the images shown sparked some flashes of nostalgia for members of the group, adding to the pleasure of a very enjoyable talk
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 08 January 2026
Attended by : 8 Members + 2 guests
Members’ Forum – Recent Family History Discoveries
One member had spent a lot of time adding large number of his DNA matches to his tree over the past year but had hit a brick wall which meant he could get no further back than Lanarkshire in the 1840s. More recently, he had attempted to resolve various smaller groups of DNA matches whose information indicated a connection back to the Scottish Highlands. It then became apparent that these smaller groups shared a common surname and location with the larger group he had previously researched. So the member now has just over 3,000 family members including more than 60 DNA matches (according to AncestryDNA) whose shared heritage goes back to the Cumming family in Edinkillie, Moray. The only problem he now has is that he is yet to find a link between that family and his own, established, family lineage in nearby Tomintoul.
Another member had been recommended to try using www.myheritage.com but had yet to get beyond the initial exploratory stage : however, they will report back at a future date!
A DNA match in Australia had been followed up by another member : she had been aware that one of her mother’s uncles had been in the workhouse, but had previously not known what became of him. It transpired that the DNA match was the great-uncle’s grand-daughter, so his life had turned out well in the end. The same member had been promised a photograph – by a local contact – of her stillborn brother’s grave in Gateshead Cemetery but this was yet to come through despite the promise being repeated.
Another member had had a contact from a possible relative in Canada. Their family trees suggest a connection, but they do not share a DNA match.
Exploring DNA matches on Ancestry using the Surname Selection option led one member to spot someone whose grandparents they used to visit in Middlesbrough several decades ago. When contacted, the person who is the DNA match responded within minutes, confirming the member’s recollections : later, they also confirmed that their 90-year-old grandfather remembers the branch member and her family. There is every possibility of a reunion taking place in Middlesbrough before too long!.
A guest said that she was born in Hexham, but had spent her early childhood in Birmingham.. her mother had been from Hexham, and her father was a Brummie of Romany descent, so there were few records of his family.
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 13 November 2025
Attended by : 6 Members + 2 guests
Kevin Johnson – Update on NDFHS Website
Kevin had kindly agreed to come and talk branch members through the various amendments and enhancements which had been made to the NDFHS website recently.
The site has a public area – which can be accessed by anyone using the internet – and a Members’ area, which is accessible only to current members of the Society by using the email address registered with NDFHS, together with a password. The visual presentation of the site has been modernised, with textual hyperlinks being replaced with “buttons” to make navigation around the site easier. The previous static image of the Tyne Bridges on the home page has been replaced with dynamic, interactive images designed to draw the user in with family history-related images with a puzzle attached.
Within the Members’ area of the website are several significant resources to aid family history research within the Northumberland and Durham area. Most members who have used the site will be familiar with the databases containing transcriptions of baptisms, marriages and burials. Kevin focussed on a couple of less-used databases – the transcriptions of Wills and Probate records and the proceedings of the Bishop of Durham’s Consistory Court. In the course of this, he demonstrated how the indexing facilitates searching by name within these records, and how images of the original documents can be viewed on FamilySearch. As well as searching the databases, members can update their account/membership details and renew their membership. There is also the facility to submit a Research Enquiry (a chargeable service) and to add surnames to the list of Family Interests : it should be noted that this is a different list to the one maintained in the NDFHS Facebook group.
Members can also access digital images of all the Society’s Journals, going back to 1975. Also available are a large selection of video recordings of Roots Chat talks : this presents branches with the opportunity to view a Roots Chat video as an alternative to having a Members’ Forum or a guest speaker at branch meetings. Another useful resource is a selection of weblinks to various relevant sites.
This was a very useful and interesting update on the NDFHS website and it is to be hoped that our branch members will be prompted to re-visit the site and perhaps explore some of the resources they had not previously thought relevant or useful for their research
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 09 October 2025
Attended by : 6 Members + 2 guests
Eddie Graham – Finding My Father
Eddie gave us a fascinating and very moving account of his 30-year quest to locate the final resting place of his father, who has been killed in action in August 1943 while taking part in the liberation of Sicily – when Eddie (and his twin brother Sydney) were just 22 days old.
Eddie’s quest to track down his father began after his mother’s death in 1982. The Army Records Office provided limited information, and it was not until 2009 that a visit to the Royal Irish Fusiliers’ regimental museum in Armagh enabled him to establish the exact date, time and circumstances of the action in which Eddie’s father had been killed.
Subsequently, in 2015, the Ministry of Defence released detailed new information about the burials of casualties. This suggested that Eddie’s father had been buried as an “unknown soldier” in a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Catania, Sicily. Eddie put together a dossier of information which convinced CWGC to agree that this unknown soldier was indeed Fusilier E Graham.
Following on from this, new gravestone was erected and in October 2017 a re-dedication ceremony with full military honours took place in Catania : Eddie and his brother Sydney took a full part in the ceremony. A BBC News camera crew filmed the event and also interviewed the Graham brothers at the place where their father had been killed : a report was broadcast on the BBC TV News that night, and Eddie was interviewed on BBC Breakfast the following day. The video recordings of these broadcasts gave an amazing amount of richness to Eddie’s story and had a strong emotional impact.
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 10 July 2025
Attended by : 8 Members
Christine Hanley & Glenice Reed – The National Memorial Arboretum (Staffordshire)
The idea of a National Centre for Remembrance had first been proposed by Commander David Childs CBE in 1988 after he had visited Arlington Cemetery and Arboretum in Virginia, USA.
He proposed the concept as a space where everyone can celebrate lives lived and remember lives lost. In 1994, an appeal for funds was launched by the then Prime Minister, John Major. Development of the site, near Tamworth in Staffordshire, began in 1998.
When Christine and Glenice visited the National Memorial Arboretum in 2015, there were about 300 memorials in place : this figure is now (2025) in excess of 400. We were shown a series of photographs showing many of the memorials, which are not to individuals but to groups of people. Various units of the UK Armed Forces are commemorated, but other nationalities are represented (such as the Polish Service Men and Women Memorial and the Colonial Kenya Police Force).
The emergency services are also commemorated, as are less obvious groups such as rail workers (the Railways Memorial is in the form of a steam locomotive) and the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain (complete with a painted horse from a fairground roundabout).
Other, less formalised, groups are represented, too. There are installations in memory of those Shot at Dawn, those represented by the Stillbirth and Neonatal Society and also the Twin Towers
The variety of styles of memorial was really striking. Some of the memorials are in quite conventional stone designs, with metal plaques containing text and insignia. But as well as the locomotive and the fairground horse there were sculptures of a polar bear, a Toc H lamp, Hermes (representing the Royal Corps of Signals) and – in the Naval Services Memorial – an array of large, multi-coloured glass panels.
All the memorials are set in a beautifully landscaped green area of about 150 acres, with water features and more than 25,000 trees. A recent addition to the site has been a 25-acre plot dedicated to NHS workers, other key workers and all those affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. This is called the Tree of Life Glade and features a Speath Alder tree. As well as the living trees, there is a very striking 4-metre bronze sculpture called the Tree of Memories.
12 June 2025 : Members’ Forum : Ag Labs to Academics – our families’ occupations
Attended by : 9 Members
The first part of the forum was taken up with a video on YouTube of a Tyne Tees TV documentary from 1986 titled Last Train to Riccarton. This showed 1956 film footage of the final rail service from Hexham up the North Tyne valley to Keilder and on to the Scottish Border, after which the line was closed and dismantled. The included reminiscences from many of those involved, including the father of one of our branch members, who spent his working life on the railways – particularly the North Tyne branch line.
The discussion which followed – perhaps inevitably considering the social history of the North East – centred on mining and heavy engineering. From various members’ contributions, it was possible to see a consistent pattern of people moving from working as agricultural labourers – or in traditional roles such as thatchers, cordwainers, shepherds or sawyers – into the burgeoning mining industry. Although the work was hard, with unpleasant and dangerous working conditions, the pay was better than that to be had in alternative occupations. Even before the demise of the coal industry, some families switched to alternative occupations such as running fish and chip shops, wet fish shops or barber’s shops. One member had researched a family tree for a friend and found many generations of miners in Yorkshire and Durham : however, the daughter of this mining family had gone on to become a university professor in the USA.
One of the group was descended from a John Hedley from Bellingham, who during the 1850s had been the butler at a large house on the outskirts of Hexham. This house was now Hexham Golf Club, the very premises in which the meeting was being held.
There was an interesting collection of photographs and ephemera from the career of the grandfather of one member – a working life in the General Post Office, starting out as a Telegraph Boy.
It was also noted that an individual’s occupation could be a very useful point of reference when researching our family trees. One member had used the occupation of Brass Button Maker to help track the movements of an individual from Birmingham in 1841 to London in 1851 to New York in 1860. Approximate dates of birth and the names of wives and children give some confidence that the person is the same one as the subject being researched, but an unusual occupation gives more certainty to the research
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 8th May 2025
Attended by : 8 Members + 1 Guest + Guest Speaker
Eddie Graham – The West Road Cemetery Project (Prudhoe)
Eddie Graham gave us a fascinating talk about the project he had instigated in 2016 to restore the sorely neglected St Mary Magdalene Cemetery in Prudhoe – locally known as West Road Cemetery.
The population of Prudhoe had grown from 210 in the 1820s to over 5,000 by the 1870s, with the opening of nine collieries resulting in a massive influx of people from elsewhere attracted by the work which, although hard, dirty and dangerous, paid better wages than agricultural labour.
The site was originally intended to be the churchyard for a new church and was opened in 1870. However, funds were not available to build the church at that time and by the time work on the new church commenced some ten years later, a new site in the centre of the town had been selected.
The cemetery was fully open from 1870 to 1903, but burials in family graves and pre-purchased plates continued until 1962, The total number of graves is close to 3,000 in an area equivalent to two football pitches. In recent times, the cemetery had fallen into a severe state of decay. It was completely overgrown, self-seeded trees had grown into grave sites, while storm damage and general weathering had occurred.
Eddie had pulled together a team of about 10 local volunteers who were willing to work on the restoration project. Gaining the necessary permissions from the Church of England and from Northumberland County Council and taken more than six months, but then work could commence.
A comprehensive, chronological sequence of photographs showed the progress of the work up to the present day, when the cemetery is a well-tended, pleasant place for remembrance and tranquility.
Most gravestones had fallen over, with some broken and buried. All the kerbstones around the graves have been re-laid, all the memorials have been brought back to the vertical and broken stones have been repaired. The site is now a wildlife haven, with provision for birds, bats, frogs and insects.
Along the way, Eddie and his team have received – richly deserved – community awards. They continue their work by maintaining the site, and offer guided tours to groups. On Wednesday mornings and Friday mornings, the volunteers are on site and are glad to talk to visitors about the project.
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 10 April 2025
Attended by : 7 Members + 1 Guest
Members’ Forum – Prizes, Awards and Medals
The most notable awards we heard about were the CBE and the Knighthood awarded to the late husband of one member : he had twice been recognised for services to the nation in his role as a senior civil servant in the Department of Employment. The investitures had taken place at St James’s Palace and had been carried out by the (then) Prince of Wales – now HM King Charles III – who, in the absence of his mother HM the Queen had done the honours. (Pun intended).
Several members had brought war service medals and other items associated with family members. A World War I Service Medal awarded to the cousin of a member’s father who had died young was circulated, along with photographs and documents. One member’s grandmother had provided nursing assistance on the Home Front during World War I as part of the Voluntary Auxiliary Detachment. Another medal was the Good Conduct Medal issued to a member’s Great Great Grandfather after serving in the Royal Artillery from 1847 to 1870.
On the sporting front, another member recalled that the only award she could remember being given to a family member was a Golf competition trophy. Another member had brought along a trophy from 1981 which her father had won as part of a pub Darts Team in a local league.
A member who grandfather had been Head Teacher at Kimblesworth School passed round a perpetual desk calendar and pen holder presented to his grandfather on his retirement in 1951.
Having been unable to find the items she had hoped to bring, another member had her mother’s School Certificate from the 1930’s : her mother had gone on to be a nurse in Hartlepool and there she had met the man who would become her husband, and our member’s father.
All these disparate items had one thing in common – that they brought to life part of the story of our family members. In the context of our meeting, each item sparked a lively, interesting and often wide-ranging conversation.
Group meeting held at 2.30pm on Thursday 13 March 2025
Attended by : 7 Members
David Butler :- Gibside : Grandeur and Magnificence
David Butler is (among other things) a volunteer for the National Trust at the Gibside site, specialising in leading guided historic walks around the estate.
He gave the group a fascinating illustrated talk on the history of the Gibside Estate and the members of the Bowes family who developed what may well have been ordinary agricultural land into the grand park and associated buildings which it became in the eighteenth century.
It is known that the land belonged to the Marley family, and then the Blakiston family, before Elizabeth Blakiston married William Bowes in 1690. Their son George Bowes (1701-1760) was the man who created the landscape of the estate we can see today.
Gibside sits on a coalfield which had previously only been exploited for local, domestic use. Newly developed technologies – Newcomen’s steam engine to pump water from mine shafts and waggonways to enable transport of coal down to the Tyne – enabled George Bowers to make an enormous fortune by exploiting the coal deposits under his land.
Bowes set about creating a home and estate designed to emphasise his wealth and enhance his status. The “grandeur and magnificence” of the completed works was recorded by a visitor. As well as a 3-storey hall, Bowes had a banqueting house, impressive stable buildings and a column topped with a statue of Liberty constructed. These structures are located in such a way that the approaching visitor would pass a series of impressive buildings separated by stretches of woodland so as to maximise their visual impact. George Bowes’ final commission was the chapel, only a year before his death : work was not completed until some 52 years later.
After Bowes’ death, the estate passed to his 11-year-old daughter. This was Mary Eleanor Bowes, an only child who marital choices were fairly disastrous. Her first marriage was unhappy with adultery by both partners, while her second husband tricked her into marriage with an elaborate plot and proceeded to squander his wife’s wealth.
It was only after Mary Eleanor managed to divorce her second husband and regain control of the estate that Gibside could recover. The restoration was largely carried out under John Bowes, 10th Earl of Strathmore, Mary Eleanor’s eldest son from her first marriage.
In the early 19th century the main house was re-modelled, being reduced to 2 storeys with the addition of the crenellations we see today. Subsequent generations of the Strathmores neglected Gibside in favour of their Scottish seat, Glamis Castle. Paintings, furniture and even fireplaces were removed to Glamis. The house was used by the Home Guard during World War 2, then the roof was removed. This led to the complete destruction of the interior, leaving the shell which remains and is now a Grade I Listed Building.
