About this site

The Oxfordshire Surname Interest List, or OXSIL, is an online resource to help genealogists and family historians find others researching the same surnames in the towns and villages of the County of Oxfordshire, England.

OXSIL is maintained in close collaboration with the Oxfordshire Family History Society.

If you submit your surname interests to OXSIL, you are essentially agreeing to receive messages from others with the same surname interests and to share information with them.  You should be aware that researchers who contact you are more likely to ask for your help than to offer theirs.

Making Contact

If you find a surname of interest and you want to contact the researcher, just click on the highlighted user name to the right of each surname to go to that user’s profile page. Each user profile includes a ready-made contact link that will open your default e-mail program and automatically put in a subject line for you so we know for whom your message is intended.

Monthly Newsletter

As well as forwarded messages, as an OXSIL user you will receive a monthly message from us with the names of recently-added surnames and any admin information of importance to do with your membership, such as any significant changes to the website or how best to use it.

E-Mail Addresses and Spam

E-mail addresses provided by OXSIL users are not published on this website, so you will not receive spam if you decide to register your surname interests on OXSIL. Messages to OXSIL users are routed via the website maintainers, who undertake to forward messages to users within a reasonable time, generally within 24 hours.

For OXSIL to function, it is essential that your e-mail address is correct and up-to-date. If it is determined that your e-mail address does not work, your surname interests and contact details will be removed from OXSIL.

Coverage

The Oxfordshire Surname Interest List covers the modern County of Oxfordshire, i.e., it also includes that area of Berkshire transferred to Oxfordshire in the local government reorganisation of 1974. If you are not sure whether the parishes you are interested in are covered, please check the Parish Register Coverage Map (courtesy of the Oxfordshire Family History Society).

A subset of the OXSIL website, the OFHS Surname Interest Directory, is available for members of the Oxfordshire Family History Society (OFHS) to register all their surname interests, including those outside the County of Oxfordshire. Non-Oxfordshire surnames listed in the OFHS Surname Interest Directory are not included on OXSIL.

Additions and Updates

If you want to add new surnames to OXSIL, please use this form to do so; if you are a member of the Oxfordshire Family History Society, entering your membership number will expand the form, allowing you to to add non-Oxfordshire surname interests to the OFHS Surname Interest Directory at the same time. If you want to make changes to existing surname entries, please include a note to that effect in the notes field.

If you already have surnames on OXSIL, please use the same form to register any new ones; if you want to register a new e-mail address, please tell us what your old address was.

Contact and Feedback

We hope we’ve covered all the essentials above. If we have missed something or you’d like to provide feedback, you can reach us via the Contact form above.

Thank you.

Bill Seary and Paul Brazell
OXSIL Co-admins

1 thought on “About this site”

  1. Dear Karen,

    Thanks for leaving a message with OXSIL. Unfortunately, OXSIL is not a message board, so I’m not sure if anybody will ever read it!

    If you are looking for a RADBURN, there are a couple of things you could do that would probably be better than posting a message here.

    For instance, you could write directly to one of the users who has registered the surname you are looking for on OXSIL. In the case of your surname, RADBURN, you’ll find a list here: https://www.oxsil.org.uk/search.pl?first=radburn&submit=Search.

    You could also ask the Oxfordshire Family History Society to help, since they have county-wide Parish Register databases as part of their Search Services and you can have a search done in the database for a small charge to recognise the work done by society volunteers in generating the record; more details here: http://searches.oxfordshirefhs.org.uk.

    If you are interested in exchanging views and experiences with others, you might also want to subscribe to the Oxfordshire Genealogy Mailing List; you’ll find more details here: https://groups.io/g/Oxfordshire-England-genealogy.

    Finally, if you would like somebody else researching the same surname in Oxfordshire to find you, perhaps you would consider registering your surname here on OXSIL? If so, you can do so using the this form.

    Hope that helps.
    Best regards
    Paul

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