NEWS ABOUT OUR CENTRE 

After almost 35 years ago based at what is now the Havant Academy, we moved to the under ground floor, the Undercroft, of St Francis church in Leigh Park. This gave us the chance to meet in the daytime as well as evenings as the need arose. So who and what are we? Well, during our life we have done our best to keep growing with technology and so have a very wide range of research material.

It is often thought by the description of the word 'Meeting' implies that we are the same as any other Family History Society, but that is a long way from the truth in many ways. We have strong records for the Havant and Portsmouth areas together with Hampshire and Sussex and the Isle of Wight,but we go wider afield than that and cover a lot of the United Kingdom and even the rest of the world.

We are, in fact, a Record Office with microfiche readers and online computers. We have an incredible number of microfiche and CDs including the IGI for the whole world. Until the pandemic we welcomed visitors at any stage of their researches and we also gave one-to-one instruction and help if needed. During the pandemic we lost over sixty per cent of our members through death of more than single members of families and so we had to partially close down but we have been able to keep our web site going and that still gives us over 5,000 visitors each month. We hope that everyone understands the action we have had to take and as the months go by we will gradually be able to get back to normal and so re-open our Centre once more. 

The Ups and Downs of names in your researches

The Office for National Statistics has just published its annual figures of the most popular baby names in England and Wales and found that perviously popular names are at risk if becoming extinct. Birth registration data shows that the latest list for 2020  give fine names - Jane, Christine, Keith, Graham and Colin coming close to extinction.

In 2020 itself, just five babies were call Keith, the lowest ever figure for the name, despite all being in the top 50 between the 1930s and 1970s.

The top five boys names in the year 2020 were Oliver at 4,225, George at 4,100, Arthur close at 4,052, Noah at 4,042 and Mohammad at 3,710.

How did the girls fare?- well Olivia was top at 3,640 followed by Amelia at 3,139, Isla at 2,749, Ava at 2,679 and then Mia at 2,303.