In case you haven’t come across it, and as the message board has been silent for a while, I thought I would tell you about the Heritage Search website at www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/heritagesearch
Several different catalogues are online here, including a partial catalogue of documents at Oxfordshire Record Office. This only represents quite a small proportion of their records (many of the old catalogues are still not available in electronic form) but it is always worth checking. Here are just a couple of Oliver entries I found:
a 1756 conveyance where the first party (probably the vendor) is a John Oliver of Stonesfield, ‘slattmaker’ and
(among the parish records of Hanborough) an undated notice of banns of marriage between Frederick Walter Mark Rawlings and Isabel Hannah Mary Oliver .
Other catalogues available on Heritage Search include: the ‘poor law name index’ with an index to some settlement and removal papers from the ‘old poor law’ (pre-1834; also includes lots of Witney apprenticeships!); a partial catalogue of photographs in the county’s photographic archive; artefacts and documents at County Museum Store in Standlake and at the regimental museum (Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and Oxfordshire Yeomanry); oral history recordings at Oxfordshire Studies; and several others….
It’s best to do an advanced search, which allows you to search for exact phrases. Even then it still finds irrelevant things, so an exact search for the phrase ‘John Oliver’ found an oral history recording by someone called Oliver St John.
The system can be tricky to navigate. It is particularly irritating that it doesn’t like it if you try using the ‘back’ button on your browser to get back to search results etc. Instead you are supposed to use links in the left-hand column (‘Back to resources’).
For more about what’s in the database, click on the word ‘Heritage’ under the ‘Leisure and Culture’ heading on www.oxfordshire.gov.uk and then click on Heritage Search. This takes you to a useful introductory page (with two PDF guides to searching for material at Oxfordshire Studies). Bizarrely there isn’t a link to this page on the main Heritage Search page.
