This site is currently under construction; it will eventually contain information about my research interests, which are mainly in East Kent (UK).
In the mean time, information can be found on the site below.
This work was started over 20 years ago by my late wife, June. We had moved away from home and family to live in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, for work. At a loss for something to fill the hours while the children were at school, June was introduced to family history by another "mum" at the school, who took her under her wing and showed her the ropes, so to speak, taking her to St Catherine's House and Somerset House and the census reading rooms in London.
Not surprisingly she began by trying to trace her own family, but ran into problems: one name was the most common name in Hampshire; another was a very rare name from Cornwall; others were from Scotland and Ireland. She then decided to research my family, which was much more straightforward, being almost entirely based in East Kent. I soon became interested and used to join her on trips to the archives whenever I could.
We became members of the Kent Family History Society and have, except for a few years break, been members for about 20 years.
When we returned to Kent I spent many hours in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives poring over original parish registers, transcribing every reference I could find to the BEER family and other related names. We eventually managed to trace the paternal line back with a fairly high degree of certainty to the mid 1500s and other lines to the 1700s and before.
When the KFHS decided to form a new branch in Deal, June and I volunteered to become members of the branch committee, for which we both worked for several years; I was Branch Chairman for two and a half years.
In 2004, June again started working on various branches of her own family and began to make headway. Following her untimely demise in December 2004 I began concentrating on these lines and managed to track down living relatives in Pennsylvania (USA) that we had been trying to locate for over 5 years.
My own family research has unearthed living relatives in Australia, New Zealand and Oregon (USA), as well as various parts of Southern England.
Please Note: as far as we can determine, there is NO connection with any BEER families in South West England (Devon).
Banks, Beer, Bowes, Castle, Cloak, Coachworth, Dixon, Evans, Ey, Farr, Golder, Graves, Hicks, Hogbin, Holmans, Marsh, Morrow, Mummery, Nutting, Pierce, Purdy, Rouse, Sawyer, Sharp, Snell, Sparnon, Willis
Over the years I have amassed a collection of almost 3,000 baptisms, marriages and deaths from local parish registers, most relating to my own family. I have included the results of searches for other people in my database, which is searchable on any combination of fields. In addition, I have collected most of the entries for my family names from every census in the Dover area from 1841 to 1901.
I am happy to do basic lookups in my database and in the local records in Dover and Deal libraries free of charge, but if more in-depth research is required, a small fee to cover costs, etc., would be required.
I can be contacted by sending a personal message to Bill749 through RootsChat.com.