This section of OysterTown encompasses both genealogy and family history with respect to Whitstable. To draw a distinction between the two we shall class genealogy as direct line descendancy such as you would research for a family tree and family history which has wider boundaries and includes relations, aspects of people's lives and details of their environment and times. This is what we call 'painting the picture' of that person's life.

These pages concentrate on family history, bringing together the feel of Whitstable during the past, the occupations that our townspeople were involved in and national events of the era to enable you to travel backwards in time and visualise how things would have been like for you in those days.

The genealogical benefit of the bringing together of this research is that people who are tracing their ancestors from the town are presented with a valuable asset to assist them. If you fall into this category we hope these pages are useful and encourage you to visit the town from where your genes originated.

On the other hand, if you are a local resident just browsing this site, take a look around these pages. There's a good chance you will come across the name of a great grandparent of your own, or even remember someone who's mentioned here. If you do, please let us know, as first hand knowledge and anecdotes about these people are invaluable in making sure we get the facts correct and are much more interesting than boring figures and dates that say nothing about the person themselves.

This type of information inevitably gets lost in time which is why we want to secure it for the town and it's children by logging as much of it as possible. The idea is to build this knowledge into a resource that will be of benefit to the town and can eventually be passed on to the local museum to safeguard it's existence for generations to come.

As this site developed it became apparent that the sections of Whitstable history, people and genealogy were really all the same thing but it was decided to keep them under different categories for ease of navigation. You will find many cross links between the sections as our townspeople interact with local and national events.

A technical tip for using these pages: If you come across one of our tables that you would like to download copy the URL (the bit at the top of your browser that shows the location of the page), then open up your spreadsheet programme (Excel,123 etc), select 'file, open' and paste into the file name box. When you then press 'return' (providing your connection is still active) it should then fill up with the page contents including the reconstructed table. Once you clear out the bits you don't want you will be left with a table that you can save for your own records.

You can search this site by using the box in the side menu. Just enter the family name or whatever you are looking for and press 'return'. Remember to use different possible spellings for the best results.

This is the index for the OysterTown Family History pages.

• OysterTown Family History index - This page.
• Census dates and population figures. - There was no consistency in the census dates which means that people 'aged' between 9 and 11 years in a ten year period. Knowing the exact census dates can help explain these 'errors'. Also population figures for England & Wales with comparisons for Whitstable.
• Memorial Inscriptions in the Whitstable cemeteries and graveyards. A small, but growing, index of headstone details from the four Whitstable cemeteries that we have images available for upon request. These are mainly of the established Whitstable family names but you never know...
• Beach Alley 1881 - A snapshot of the 1881 census in the heart of the town.
• The Oyster Gedcom Project - We begin to research one family and expand from there.
• The current Oyster Gedcom at Rootweb Now you can search the database as it builds and start to explore the links from one Whitstable family to another as they spread around the world.

Links to useful resources on the Web, local family sites.