As ever increasing numbers of visitors and contributors came to the Oystertown site it became obvious that some sort of direct communication was required to enable pooling of information between researchers.

This was achieved with the introduction of the Oystertown newsletter which is now sent out on a weekly basis to interested people throughout the world.

The newsletters are a mixture of freshly aquired data, interesting finds by members, current news about work on the site and Whitstable itself. Sometimes the subjects may be controversial but are always treated from a point of view of caring about the heritage of the town and its people.

It can take a while for these subjects to be dealt with fully on the site so in this section you will find the archived newsletters in case any of the subjects raised are of interest to you.

You may have arrived on the site as a direct result of your search matching such a subject somewhere you may not have thought to look. The relevance to current news in Whitstable today is the act of recording what tomorrow will be history and therefore of interest to historians in the future.

Very often we receive emails comprising of information that will connect into the site at some time as work is carried out in that area. A mention of these within the newsletter, together with its reprint on the site, will often bring other related topics into the open.

As the newsletter evolved it was felt that it would benefit from images but in order to maintain the streamline use of text for speed and not to overload member's inboxes these were built as special pages on the site with a connecting link from the newsletter. Many of these pages are now included within the site but sometimes in a different format to those tested via the newsletter.

So now, many generations after some of the families of Whitstable left the oysters in search of a new life, the Oystertown newsletter is following them to enlighten their descendants and deliver them pearls, wherever they now live. You can take the Native out of Whitstable but you can never take Whitstable out of the Native.

Date	Issue	Content
26/10/2003	31026	Further news of the sunken FLIRT. The Shingleston family link into the Foreman family. War Memorial research. Looking for headstones.
2/11/2003	31102	1891 Census transcriptions - Can we read the names more accurately with prior knowledge? Birth of the Oyster Gedcom, postcards.
9/11/2003	31109	Poppies and pins but no wreath - Modern laws that trivialise life. Tracing the Oyster Company treasurer who did a runner with the funds. 1897 Flood postcard pictures.
16/11/2003	31116	Upload of the Remembrance Day page. "I have been carrying out family history research for 34 years. I have been stuck for 33 years!" - A meeting of the Kent Family History Society in Canterbury.
23/11/2003	31123	Memorial Inscriptions, Millstrood Road Cemetery map, more on the Oyster Gedcom, a useful mariners site, sites linking to Oystertown.
30/11/2003	31130	1948 Whitstable Times - Obituaries, The Rigden Family. The 1891 mariners and vessel transcription work.
7/12/2003	31207	Teleradio to close after 57 years. A football teamsheet from 1898. A Christmas tie-up with the press?
14/12/2003	31214	Whitstable Times archive newspapers. New discoveries and a time to reflect on morbidity and the path we follow.
21/12/2003	31221	It's Christmas so a story about the Carpenter who came to town, helped finish the Church and begat a dynasty.
28/12/2003	31228	Generations together at Christmas. Reliable sources? Goodsell. Anderson, Rigden and Perkins the boatbuilders.
4/1/2004	40104	A new year and new hopes. Teleradio close their door for the last time. More E.B. 1940's articles - The Whitstable Divers, Edmond Gann and his memories.
11/1/2004	40111	Gedcom files. The birth of ancestors.oystertown.net. E.B. article - "They all had Nicknames", tieing the nickname to the person.