Who do you think you are and why do you think the place in which you live looks like it does? The study of family and local history is getting ever more popular, and with more archives available on the web the past will become even more accessible to explorers in the future. Now Oxford University Press has produced a new edition, 14 years after the original, of The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History (£14.99). Editor David Hey remarks in his preface: “A new edition is needed to take account not only of the many books and articles that have been published in recent years but the present availability of documentary sources other information on the Internet.”

He adds: “The enormous popularity of Family History and the great range of source material that is now readily available on websites is acknowledged by the placing of Family History before Local History in the title of the present volume.”

But whatever alleyway you want to go down, this book, used in conjunction with your computer, will prove invaluable. For instance, down the road from my home in West Oxfordshire — more specifically in the former Royal Forest of Wychwood, which was deforested in 1859 — is a lovely building, now a care home, called the Old Prebendal, in Shipton-under-Wychwood. I have long wondered what a Prebendal was.

Now I gather from the A-Z in this book that a Prebendary was a member of a cathedral chapter who received money from a “peculiar jurisdiction”— which in turn was a parish which, for one reason or another, was exempt from the jurisdiction of the diocese in which it found itself.

And turning to my computer, I then discovered that the Prebendary in Shipton-under-Wychwood in the 16th century was none other than John Foxe (1517-1587), the author of that least cheery of best sellers The Book of Martyrs, first published in Latin in 1554 and translated into English in 1563.

He was a member of the Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral, but received £40 a year Prebend from Shipton-under-Wychwood; and though he seldom visited his Prebendal, I gather he was “very concerned about the spiritual welfare of the villagers”.

Also in Shipton-under-Wychwood is a memorial to 17 inhabitants of the village who died when the Cospatrick, the ship supposedly taking emigrants to a new life in New Zealand, caught fire in 1874. From the Companion I learned that by 1840 only about 2,000 Europeans had settled in New Zealand, which had been discovered by Tasman in 1642 and named after a province in the south-west Netherlands. During the next decade the number increased ten fold.

After the deforestation of Wychwood, West Oxfordshire became the source of more emigrants to the New World than any other part of England except Cornwall, which was suffering from the run-down of tin mining. In Shipton-under-Wychwood a tent was regularly erected on the Green to inform villagers of emigration opportunities.

From the article under Emigration in the Companion I discovered that between 1846 and 1869 some 339,000 emigrants from Britain and Ireland to the New World received government help with the fare, but this was only seven per cent of emigrants at the time. The great joy of this book is that enables you to fit particular events into the great scheme of things.

Certainly the Companion will be constantly by my side when I write these columns. It is excellent bedside reading too, full of intriguing facts to interest both serious historians and collectors of unconsidered trifles. For instance, I never knew that the science of distilling “was learned from the Arab world” and performed here in the Middle Ages mainly by apothecaries and in monasteries, to quote just one of hundreds of such tit-bits.