THS

Woodard Database

Tewkesbury Historical Society

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Woodard Database

This database, possibly unique to the Society, was inspired by the late Bob Woodard who was our first honorary member. He was following his own lines of research into his home area of 'Gravel Walk' and, to assist this process, he started to record census data on computer.

He introduced us to the Idealist software then published by Blackwell’s for scientific purposes.

The software was purchased by the Society with financial help from the local councils, while the hardware is provided by the County Library Service and the computer is located in the Town Library. Tuition for using the database is provided every Thursday afternoon, sponsored by Tewkesbury School.

At present, system limitations enable researchers only to print out pages from the database which are to be purchased from the Library Staff, but in future we hope that the Library Service will provide a newer computer with an expanded memory so that:-

researchers will be able to transfer located data from Idealist to Microsoft Word for easier manipulation and storage.
the database can incorporate photographs and other illustrations

At present, we have over 66,512 records in this database – and remember – they can be searched in seconds for that desired nugget of information; the modern equivalent of find an elusive needle in a haystack! There are now 250 photographs included.

The database is continually updated - use this link to view recent additions to the database.

Privacy Policy: rest assured that any personal information you share with us will be kept in the strictest confidence and will not be passed on to third parties.

This page was last revised 14 January 2007. Please report any errors or problems with these pages to the Webmaster