Desborough: A Family Story

[SuzanneD]

As the home page says, the site A Family History: Desborough Study started off as a personal family tree but has expanded into a very useful site with parish register transcriptions (extensive but not yet complete) and other parish records such as settlement orders, census transcriptions and other interesting bits like transcribed newspaper articles. There is also a comprehensive name index and family pages linking back to the sources, and some statistical analysis. An excellent labour of love.

 

[Grapes]

I support everything SuzanneD says above about this excellent site. I have never before come across such a wide-ranging genealogy site. It is actually a one town study site rather than a one name site because it contains huge amounts of information which could benefit people like me (and in fact did) when I have no familial relationship with the site author and owner.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Interesting and detailed site. To me it has a glaring omission though. No maps!!

As someone who enjoys pouring over old maps I find I get a great feel for a place by looking at various maps of the place from different eras. I find it astonishing therefore in a site dedicated to a single town that there is no map of any prominence at all to let me know where Desborough actually is. Now of course a couple of seconds on Google Maps rectifies this but surely a one place study should have at least one map of the place prominently indexed?

Using the search facility I note there are some maps available but there aren't highlighted as part of the main site. As I say decidedly odd for a place study. Never the less some incredibly detailed info and clearly a labour of love that one wishes was available for other towns and parishes. Congratulations to the author.

 

[Norman]

My wife, Diane, is a regular visitor to this excellent site. Her maternal grandmother and immediate family are in the Desborough study. Another cousin is the subject of one of the "Desborough stories".

 

[Grapes]

Maps are good! I suspect that the absence may be as much due to the fact that this site probably set out to be a personal genealogical site and grew with the owner's enthusiasm to add more and more detail. It was me who called it a "one town study" because that's what it has started to become but it may not be what the owner intends or intended.

Like Norman above I have relatives on her site including my father and some of his family.