Friday, May 06, 2005

Bitton Families

the people of Bitton and surrounding areas near Keynsham Bristol Gloucestershire
A fine new one place study
from my Bristol_and_Somerset list email:-


While searching through the Saltford and Bitton church records for my
WILLIAMS family of brassworkers, the names of various Bitton families, so
familiar from the B&S list, kept turning up like old friends. By recording
and sharing this info with the list I came into contact with Marsha, who has
copperworkers (THOMPSONs) amongst her ancestors.

Not being much of a typist, I mentioned to her that I'd like to put up some
of the info I'd found on a few basic web pages, if I could find a few people
to type up a page each. With my very basic html skills, I envisaged about
three pages of transcriptions, to share some of the info I'd found.

Marsha said she had wanted to make a Bitton website for some years, does
type, and had already reserved the bittonfamilies URL! And so we started. At
first we thought it would be just a database of transcriptions, but as we
worked the site grew and grew.

Nearly two years later I've learned a lot about html and web site building,
and we're finally ready to go live and share our work with our fellow
researchers. It has grown into a huge project and who knows where it can go
from here as others add to our communal knowledge. It is becoming a
"virtual" community, where you can wander through Bitton in the 17th, 18th
and 19th centuries - seeing who lived where, and meeting all the ancestors
and their neighbours.

Its been a lot of hard work and lots more to come, but I'm really pleased
with our achievement and love seeing the Bitton of old brought to life in
cyberspace. I'm proud to dedicate our work to the ancestors who inspired us
to create this website - the people of Bitton. Their lives were hard but
they had a happy and vibrant community, surviving through good and bad
times, hard labour, unemployment, the pain of childbirth and loss of many
infants, the support of friends and neighbours, etc. etc.

The families they successfully nurtured spread from Bitton to all corners of
the globe. Without them, we would not be here today.

ENJOY!


Marsha Stringer (nee MEERE)
(near Boston, MA, USA)
Clare
(near Sydney, Australia)

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