Bristol & Avon
Family History Society

If you haven’t, or if you want to know more, join us next Monday (9 December) for our Bristol Group meeting where Donna Rutherford will be talking about the use of DNA in genealogy research – including what is DNA, what types of tests are available and how to interpret the results. The talk is online only and starts at 7.30pm – members will be sent details by email.

John Latimer (1824-1904) was a journalist who wrote a history of Bristol from 1601 to 1900 from old documents and chronicles. Many of these histories have now been scanned and are accessible for free through the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/ which is also a fantastic resource for all sorts of books and other published material.

You may have seen in the media that there is currently a consultation at The Law Commission to reform the law of burial and cremation in the UK. They have produced a consultation paper and a summary and are looking for comments by 9 January 2025. We suggest you view the papers and respond using their online questionnaire if you wish to comment. There is a short video to watch as well explaining this and all the details at https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/burial-and-cremation Have your say!

The Bath group attended the Bath History Fair last weekend which was very successful. The most popular item was the new Bath Map which shows the town in 1904, with surviving and vanished buildings. We also had a number of enquiries for “The Year of the Pageant” which tells the story of the Bath Pageant of 1909. One of the places you can buy a copy of either is our own BAFHS Webshop – https://bafhs.org.uk/shop / where both are currently available.