janetbarrie
Chair
Janet Barrie, UK

Janet is an anaesthetist by profession. She has been studying her family history for 20 years and her one-place studies place for around 10 years. She has an MA in Biblical Interpretation and is interested in how texts are constructed and interpreted within specific contexts. 

She also enjoys primary sources, whether these are documents, artefacts or recordings. Her One-Place Study website can be found at www.springhillhistory.org.uk or on Twitter @Springhill_OPS

Jude Rhodes
Secretary
Jude Rhodes

Jude is from Yorkshire and lives in the Yorkshire Dales, much of her work is focused on Yorkshire family and local history with a specialism of the Yorkshire Dales and an interest in migration from the Dales.

Jude has always been interested in her family roots, about 35 years ago she began researching her family history with help from her parents; following all four grandparents and eight great grandparents she soon realised that her family were firmly rooted in Yorkshire. Jude’s passion is combining family and local history to create social histories of individuals, families and communities. This led to the Society of One Place Studies where Jude has two studies, one rural and one urban – in Yorkshire!

Jude qualified as a genealogist through the Pharos and Society of Genealogists Advanced Skills and Strategies course and is an AGRA Associate, a member of the British Association for Local History Outreach Committee and Secretary for the Society of One Place Studies.

Jude enjoys presenting talks on a wide range of topics and teaches Family History at her local Further Education College.
As a Registered Nurse Jude also assists individuals, and their families, who are living with a dementia by using family history to stimulate meaningful and relevant conversations.

lizcraig
Treasurer
Liz Craig, UK

Liz became interested in family history as a child, having grown up with a family tree of fascinating Welsh names on her bedroom wall, which her father brought to life with stories he’d heard from his great aunts. She has three one-place studies: a village, a street and a home for inebriate women. Her village study is the Suffolk village of Sudbourne, where her grandmother, great grandfather, and many other ancestors were born. It has a rich history going back several centuries. On a smaller scale, she is also doing a Street Study of St Ronan’s Avenue in Southsea, Hampshire, which is a Victorian terraced cul-de-sac of 28 houses, built in 1900. She is also researching The Temple Lodge Home for Inebriate Women in Torquay (operational 1891-1929) having found an ancestor there in 1901. She was intrigued… What was this institution like? What treatments did they use? Unable to find much information, she decided to research Temple Lodge and its patients herself, to add context to her family history by finding out about the lives of the women who spent time as patients and staff in Temple Lodge.

 

Mick Warner cropped circle image
Editor, Destinations
Mick Warner, UK
Mick lives in Manchester and for the last 40 years has worked in social housing as auditor, regulator, consultant and Board member.
Having graduated from the University of Sheffield in 1986, Mick returned to studying 30 years later to undertake a History MA with the Open University. His dissertation was on the work of Blackpool Corporation’s Advertising Committee between 1890 and 1930. The Committee’s budget was funded through a provision in The Blackpool Improvement Act 1879, giving the Corporation the power to spend two pence in the pound on the borough’s rateable value on advertising the attractions of the town. Rival seaside resorts were generally denied the power to spend the rates on advertising themselves until 1921.
 
Mick is originally from Creswell, a former coal mining village in North-East Derbyshire. His One-Place Study is about a disaster which occurred at Creswell Colliery when, in the early hours of 26 September 1950, a conveyor used to move coal underground caught fire. 80 men were trapped underground and lost their lives in the disaster.
stevep
Webmaster
Steve Pickthall, UK

Steve’s interest in family history began in the early 1980’s after seeing a friend’s mother sorting through her own family history. He quickly established that his family’s roots were primarily in East & West Sussex, Worcestershire & Devon. He took the Community & Family History course as part of his OU degree and developed a particular interest in parish clerks/sextons/church wardens (roles filled by some of his ancestors); he now maintains an online register of these together with an index of people involved in fatal railway accidents. His One-Place Study is New Fishbourne, West Sussex as it is somewhere where he has family connections, he had already done some research about it (for the OU course), and it was about the right size (population approx. 300). He started the study around 2005, as an interest he could pursue with his young daughter. She has now outgrown it but he continues to dabble. 

He already looked after three other websites (a family history society, a local history society and his own website), so volunteered to take on the One Place Studies webmaster role to fill in his spare time.

cropped_circle_image
Vice-Chair
Vacancy

 

helenshields
Webinar Coordinator
Helen Shields, UK

Helen’s family has a long association with Sticklepath, and so has an interest in its heritage. This village in Devon, South West England, still feels like home to her even though she has lived in many other places since. Since retiring from general practice she has enjoyed learning about how to investigate her family tree and the village history. This came together into a One-Place Study, brought to her attention by Janet Few after a Pharos course on writing your family history. She wants to encourage all One-Placers to share an ‘In-depth Report’ – which can be a ‘work in progress’ not a final report because you can always update it in the future. She loves reading about other Studies and getting ideas about similarities and differences as well as new things to investigate.

janeharris
Events Manager
Jane Harris, UK

Jane never set out to do a One-Place Study but the 1861 Census population of North Walls and Brims, Orkney, would not let her abandon them after they were the focus of a project for her postgraduate diploma in Genealogical Studies. The area was her father’s birthplace and home to several generations of his family on both sides, and setting them in context was her original motivation. Things have rolled along, somewhat fitfully, from there. She has been researching her own family history for about 20 years and is a professional genealogist. Previously, she has worked in a church, taught French, was a librarian/information manager and held a few posts in university student services.

Steve Jackson
Social Media Coordinator 
Steve Jackson, UK

After he had been intrigued by his Mum’s maiden surname ‘Atcherley’ for many years, an episode of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ in 2007 finally prompted Steve to look into his maternal family history. He was soon hooked; an interest gradually turned into a passion, and years later he is still researching and chronicling the lives of the Atcherleys. As part of his research he visited Waters Upton churchyard in Shropshire to find the last resting place of his 3x great grandmother (Mary Titley, nee Atcherley) and her husband. While there he photographed all the gravestones and other monuments with legible inscriptions so he could upload the information and images to Find A Grave. Of course, as a genealogist he was curious about all the people whose inscriptions he had photographed and so began to research them, little knowing that he was starting a One-Place Study in addition to his one-name / surname study!

Julie Muirhead
Blog Coordinator 
Julie Muirhead, UK

Julie is a Professional Genealogist who holds the Higher Certificate in Genealogy from the Institute of Heraldic & Genealogical Studies and is starting the Diploma in Genealogy Course in January 2026.

She has had an interest in family history since 1978 when her maternal Grandfather gave her a copy of his mother’s family tree when she was just 8 years old (she still has it). She started her initial research in the early 1990s but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that her quest for knowledge about her family’s past became a passion. It was around this time she discovered her connection to the parish of St Mary Bourne, Hampshire a few miles from where she lives.

Combining the Local History with the Family History has really helped her understand more about the generations of people in her family tree that lived there. Learning more about local shops, pubs, doctors, crime, farms, landowners etc adds to the stories of the place and the people that lived there and how the interacted with each other.

It didn’t take long for her to realise that to understand her family in this place she needed to learn more about it’s history. For many years she gathered data about not just the people but the place too, it was then a One-Place Study but she didn’t know it. Like many people find, a place seems to choose them and in 2023 she joined the society and formally registered the study.

She is also a member of many other societies as well as being an Associate of AGRA and a student member of RQG.

George Hall
Committee Member 
George Hall, UK

George is an undergraduate History and Politics student, with a keen interest in family history, and local history, particularly in three distinct areas – his native Spen Valley in the heart of West Yorkshire, the ancient City of York, and Monkwearmouth, Sunderland.

He has two One-Place studies based in the Spen Valley – one of Heckmondwike Grammar School, his old school with its unlikely foundations in Edwardian England, and another of the local Liversedge Cemetery, which he took to print in his 2022 self-published book, Liversedge’s Finest.

B.J. Jamieson
Committee Member 
B. J. Jamieson, USA

B.J. Jamieson is the genealogy reference specialist at the Maine State Library, which lets her indulge her love of books and genealogy to an extent that she didn’t think was possible before she accepted the position. One of her favorite parts of her job is speaking around Maine and at regional and national conferences about family and local history. She has a postgraduate certificate in genealogy from the University of Strathclyde as well as a master’s degree in library science from Clarion University. When she isn’t tracing ancestors (her own and other people’s), she can be found knitting or playing with foster cats.

The Society for One-Place Studies is a leading organisation dedicated to supporting One-Placers worldwide.

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