BarhamHistory.com
The Name and Family of Barham
by Sydney Pay Barham
This material came into my possession in the late 1960s.
My father was a family doctor in Hythe, Kent, and one of his patients, Mr Frederick "Nobby" Clark lent him a ring-binder, containing research on the Barham family in Kent and Sussex. There was no indication of the authorship and so at the time I mistakenly attributed it to Mr Clark.
Photocopiers at the time were not widely available, and prohibitively expensive. However we did not want to return it without somehow recording the contents, so my father and I dictated it on to reel-to-reel tape. We also made a manual transcription of the family tree that was included.
Over the next few years I typed up the work, but sadly some of the tape was recorded over by my flat mates. (I was a student in London at the time).
Nevertheless I did manage to transcribe most of the work, and it sat in a ring-binder on my shelf for several years. Then in 1992, a year after I had obtained an email account with Compuserve, I received an mail from a Bill Barham in the USA. In those days there was no such thing as privacy and data protection (or indeed spam), and you could look up the address of anyone else who had a Compuserve account.
Bill asked if I had any information relating to his ancestors, and so I posted copies of the work to him. Bill had worked for IBM, and as he had access to OCR software he scanned it all in and emailed it back to me, together with a significant amount of his own information.
In 2015 I was contacted by Clive Barham, a distant cousin of Sydney Pay Barham (SPB) who advised me of the correct provenance of the work.
In 2018 I visited the Museum in Cranbrook and the archevist there kindly potocopied some material that had been bequeated by SPB including Notes on the Name and Family of Barham and Notes on the Surname Barham, which I assume were early drafts of the main work
The photograph below (also from the Cranbrook archives) of a wedding at the Providence Chapel, probably in 1904, includes SPB on the far right of the back row.
