Hanaa, aged 3½

The Help Desk takes the "Ask Chris" queries sent to the "Resident Genealogist" and produces or updates the answer web pages.

An exciting month with some really challenging questions. Several queries relate to people who were "on the move". While proof is needed it looks as if Ann Gray was born in Hertfordshire in 1846 because her father was a navvy helping to build a railway. Meanwhile Lynn is trying to find records of a "portable theatre" (a bit like a circus with a stage) which was in the Ware area in 1888. Meanwhile it is possible that William Miller reached Australia via China!

A query about Truman Press, editor of the Hertfordshire Standard, has turned up some interesting information about this St Albans paper and some other Hertfordshire publications. I was interested to note that several Wood children were baptised together on 30th June 1837, the day before civil registration was introduced. The other queries included two illegitimacies - Dollimore & Shepherd - may prove hard to untangle - but I could give some advice as to where some additional information might be obtained.

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The Hiker's duty is to wander round the county collecting information on towns, villages and hamlets which could be of interest to family and local historians.

Over the last seven years this web site has expanded enormously and it has become increasingly difficult to find books and links which refer to the whole county. A new page/menu has been created for HERTFORDSHIRE to make it easier to navigate this site, with links to adjacent counties.

Due to lack of time the process of restructuring the bigger towns, jointly with the Webmaster, has been put on hold - but it was decided to see how well the approach could be used for a typical small village. Barley was the guinea pig and the result has been very successful. (What do you think?)

There were the usual batch of updates, although the addition of about 20 post card images has been left for the next newsletter. The most significant of these updates was for The Grove, Watford, which included a lengthy descriptive text and a picture. This was to support the added document Grove School, Watford, 1925-1929 by Phyllis Thompson.

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The Book Worm reviews books, web sites and other published material relevant to Hertfordshire.

There is an interesting crop this month. Three books have been added on Elstree & Boreham Wood and three on Kings Langley and neighbouring Chipperfield. Bibliographic details are given of books on the History of Freemasonry in Hertfordshire published in 1893 and a recently published book on the Hertfordshire Volunteer Reserve in the First World War.

The Hertfordshire section of John Taylor's Taverns in Ten Shires, published in 1636, is reproduced in its entirety. It is earliest surviving list of these establishments, but for most towns and villages only gives the name of the publican, and not the sign of the tavern.

A page has been drafted on the history of the St Albans based Hertfordshire Standard Newspaper (1877-1907). The newspaper editor also published Hertfordshire Men of Mark - and I observe that one of the people he describes in sycophantic terms was found guilty of fraud a few months later and barred from working as a solicitor!

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The Postcard Detective is interested in history as revealed by postcards.

My mystery picture this month is a large group of injured WW1 patients taken by a St Albans photographer. The quality of the image is such that individual portraits can be extracted. Is one of the soldiers or nurses your ancestor and if so can you help identify where and when the picture was taken.

No one has been able to identify any of the pictures in the Rogues Galley, during the last month.

The Teacher's job is to keep the help pages up-to-date, to extend the Tutorial, extend the Subject Index, to put useful texts online, and to introduce links to other helpful web sites.

Three new "documents" were added during the month. The real prize is an account of life at the Grove School, Watford, in the 1920s, by Phyllis Thompson. Two old reports have also been published online. The Tring Zeppelin describes the German flights over West Hertfordshire in the First World War. The  St Albans Councillors lists members of the St Albans Council from 1835 until the First World War. There is also an old news cutting about watercress and a link has been added pointing to HALS newspaper holdings. A link is also given to a site for St Albans Nostalgia.

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The Web Master's job is to make sure that the site runs smoothly, that there are no broken links, and that changes such as the introduction of menus go smoothly.

This month the number of web pages on the site have increased to over 2500. Part of the increase is due to restructuring - breaking down larger pages and introducing more menus.

I have passed the following note to the Genealogist about the future of the site.

Since the site was first set up people have been invited to make a donation to a mental health charity of their choice. At the beginning of the year it was suggested that anyone who found the site useful might make a donation to the newly formed Herts Mind Network and facilities were made to collect donations electronically. A small number of donations have been received under the new arrangements.  (Thanks if you were one of the donors) However the number making a donation is disappointingly low. The total donations since Christmas work out at less than 5p per man hour (less than 1% of the National minimum wage) spent answering questions and running the web site. Quite clearly the site is an extremely ineffective way of raising charity funds, while the small number of donations compared with the number of visitors to the site suggests that no-one would miss the site if it closed down.