August 2024 – Update

This month has been focused on the Ephemera that has survived from the local bus service that was based at one particular property. With posts divided based upon the name of the business at different times.

• 1919-1941 Pioneer House – St. Mary Bourne Motor Services (Tibble and son)
• 1941-1969 Pioneer House – Pioneer Motor Services

With these I deliberately chose to focus these at a place, as Pioneer House (current name) has only recently been made a house and for the majority of its life it was a business. The earlier & later businesses that formed part of the history of the property can then fit into the structure started with the Bus posts.

Behind the scenes the people database has grown considerably with all baptisms from 1790, marriages from 1770 and burials from 1800 up to the 1841 census all in the database. This has, as to be expected resulted in some duplication, I am now going through all the records to try to eliminate this where I can and also work out which of these people were in the parish at the time of the 1831 census. Along with doing this I am trying to connect the families together where I can that are not already connected by working through one surname at a time. Standardisation of surnames is something I am doing too as spellings are recorded as they were at the time of a record being created in the source for the event in the database. This makes it a lot easier to track down duplications and the only variation to this would be if a surname was spelt one way for a significant period of time then changed then both would be shown. With St Mary Bourne it is in general just spelling variations such as GOODYEAR being recorded as GOODYER. Spelling variations are also found in the first name; HANNAH is often recorded as HANAH, ANN may be ANNE, sticking to one version with the sources showing how the name was spelt in the source is what I am doing.

When time allows I am also continuing trying to link the 1841 Census and Tithe together along with more transcribing on the Overseers Accounts which I hope to start to be able to add to the database sooner rather than later as this will help establish which were the poorer families in the parish.

I have pages of accounts already photographed that need the data transcribing, and many more years still to copy. This small extract gives you an idea of what is in them. All these people were paid the amounts shown on the right on 8 Jan 1830, this was poor relief! some of these people may also be found in an extra section each month which was “Road Pay” meaning they repaired/worked on the roads to earn some money from the parish. Some of these entries also give a number of days/weeks suggesting that they may have worked on the roads when they didn’t have their usual employment available.