Frequently Asked Questions will hopefully answer some of the queries you might have about this website, what's in it, how you can get involved, etc.

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The civil parish of Netherbury in West Dorset which encompasses the villages of Netherbury, Melplash & Salway Ash along with several hamlets including Waytown & Oxbridge.

Netherbury is in West Dorset.

The village is approximately 2km south of Beaminster and 7km north of Bridport and is positioned to the north of the Parish which extends to approximately 1.5km north of Bridport at its southern extremity.

Yes.

Houses don't have to be old to have a history. In fact, if your house is fairly new it's important that we record some of its history before it is forgotten.

Who built it? Who designed it? Who commisioned it to be built? What was there before it was built? These sorts of details are missing from the histories of many of the older houses and this is the best time to capture that information if you can pin it down for the newer houses

If you haven't already, try searching here. If you cannot find any info here there are other sources - Beaminster Museum has information about all the Parishes that surround Beaminster and the volunteers there are knowledgeable and helpful. Further afield there is Bridport Museum and their Local History Centre, Somerset & Dorset Family History Society in Yeovil and The Dorset History Centre in Dorchester.

You can do a vast amount of research from home by using the internet. Organisations such as Free UK Genealogy make searchable databases of their transcriptions of Indexes of Birth, Death & Marriages Regsiters, Censuses and Parish Registers of Baptisms, Marriakes & Burials available for free. If you are willing to pay a subscription ancestry.co.uk & findmypast.co.uk are two of the leading websites which have a vast amount of information.

If you have any old documents associated with your house these will probably be the best starting point. Deeds, wills, etc. will give you the names of people who used to live there and this is the key to uncovering its past. Until relatively recently most houses were identified by the people occupying them. It's only with the popularisation of the postal service in the mid-19th century that most houses were given formal addresses.

Researching the history of a house really boils down to researching the history of who has lived there.