I have four books that address the history of Gosport. Three of those books address fairly recent history because they use photography a lot. So they aren’t going to pre-date the 20th century by many years. The fourth book is a bit different. Yes it does have a few plates, but they are not the focus of the book which is what I think of as being more akin to being a serious history book.
This made me think about how would you going about researching the history of a specific topic. In this case Gosport, but it could be any location, especially as I am very likely to change the focus of my locality project in the future.
I’ve been doing a little bit of research. I thought I would start with the courts, they have records which must be public in some if not all cases. The Hampshire archives have records going back to the 1600’s. I’m kind of hoping these records are digitally stored and therefore searchable and more importantly translated from the English of that time, which I think is quite difficult to understand because of the writing and the spelling.
The trouble is that I don’t think that is the case. Material from 1655 must be in the original format. I’m going to have to explore this.
Bills Posts 