Bucks Family History Society has won the 2010 Website Award from the Federation of Family History Societies. The award, in the large Societies category, follows the 2nd and 3rd placings gained in the last three years.




BucksFHS was one of the very first Societies to have a website and has been on-line for over 15 years. Joint web-master Dave Foster commented "when we started out on the net websites were little more than one or two pages of information. Everyone was using old dial up modems which all seems very slow by today's standards but we all thought it was state of the art back then. What we can do now would have seemed almost magical".

The judges made the following comments about Society sites that were entered in the 2010 competition "All the candidate sites provided well thought out and well maintained offerings with good coverage of the society, its resources and activities — that is, all these sites are fulfilling their core function. But most are doing a lot more, particularly in terms of providing reference information and data for both members and non-members. A very welcome development is the increasing number of societies who offer the facility to join or renew a subscription on-line, which can only have a positive effect on membership numbers."

Bucks FHS Chairman, Graham Taylor-Paddick,
receives the Award from FFHS President Lady Teviot


The current version of the BucksFHS website, developed by Derek Ayshford, Dave Foster and Tony Sargeant has an on-line shop which sells publications, database searches and memberships, extensive reference material and photographs grouped by parish and also the Churchfinder tool which helps to find the parish for a marriage from just the Civil Registration (BMD) Index reference. With an update due soon to the site's operating software we are already looking at how this can be used to make the website even better.

This was the 10th year of the FFHS Web Awards and this year they were sponsored by the publishers of Family Tree and Practical Family History magazines.

Click here for the Federation of Family History Societies' website