Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero, that blissful state in which your inbox is empty because all the incoming emails have been dealt with, filed or deleted.

You know what's not so blissful? When you inadvertently achieve Inbox Zero because something has gone horribly awry in your email account and the emails are simply not there anymore at all. Specifically, in this case, the archive of many years' worth of emails and information from others with ancestors from Wing.

I should hopefully be able to restore the vast majority of those from an offsite backup. Hopefully. Just keep breathing...

UPDATE: it turns out that no, you cannot open an offsite backup of an .ost file. Insert bad word here. :( 

Blue moon

It's been a relatively genealogy-free month for me this month. One week of that was because I was overseas, on holiday at Trinity Beach in Queensland Australia. So lovely.....

Towards the end of our trip we discovered Blue Moon Grill. If you are ever in the area (or not, it's worth going significantly out of your way for), stop in for a meal - I had fish of the day, which was more like fish of a lifetime! The food is amazing and the staff are hilarious - do download their menu and make sure you read the fine print!

Allotments at Waddesdon Manor

I'm back to work now after the holidays so haven't had much time for genealogy (or random web surfing) over the last couple of weeks. However I did come across this - if you've got a young family and fancy an allotment at Waddesdon Manor, five are up for grabs. See here for the details. Wouldn't it be nice to see this at Ascott House as well? Growing your own food is a lovely insight into the life of the generations that came before us.

Stalled

I'm away at a conference for the next few days so I won't be responding to any emails. This timing means it's very unlikely I'll have the milling page finished for the October update either.

I see there has been no taker for the £30 copy of Wing As It Was on Ebay. Anyone tempted?

Cottesloe Beach

Yes, you read that right.....

There is a beach named Cottesloe Beach on the western coast of Australia near Perth. For the last few years, a sculpture exhibit has been staged on the beach in March. Coincidentally, my parents have just got back from a holiday in Perth and visited Cottesloe as this year's exhibit got underway, so here's two of their shots hot off the camera:



The Cottesloe district in Perth is named after Thomas Francis Fremantle who became the first Baron Cottesloe in 1874. He was indeed from Buckinghamshire, and was the big cheese in Swanbourne, 6 miles west of Wing and also within the old Cottesloe hundred.

Behind the scenes

I haven't done much on the genealogical front in the last week or so. I should be busily working through DearMyrtle's February checklist, in particular crosschecking between the hard-copy information in my newly sorted ringbinders against the electronic information in my PAF file, but instead I've been busy making tomato sauce and pasta sauce with my tomato harvest, and........

I've finally gone ahead and purchased the latest upgrade to Adobe Lightroom, the program I use to process digital photos, so I've been getting distracted with that! I shoot in RAW, which means that less processing is controlled by the camera - one good thing about this is that as more sophisticated software is released you are able to go back and reprocess your photos to get a subtly better result. This is particularly handy when they are travel photos from the other side of the world and you don't have a chance to retake them.

Unfortunately a rubbish photo is still a rubbish photo. While I've been trying to tinker with the photos I took when visiting Wing in 2005, running around in the rain on a tight schedule, they're still not up to scratch - right now I have a slightly displeased expression on my face, somewhat like this cherub on a fountain at Ascott House:

Let it snow

I see that Buckinghamshire, along with the rest of Britain, is buried under snow. I'm sure all you genealogists are making the most of your snowdays. Keep warm, everyone!

You can see reader-submitted photos in the Bucks papers here:
Bucks Herald
Bucks Free Press (they also have a Snow Covered Bucks Through The Ages gallery)
The Leighton Buzzard Observer doesn't have any galleries up yet.

If anyone can point me to a photo of Wing in this week's snow I'd love it! Or better yet, if you happen to live in the immediate vicinity, take a few and email them to me, and I'll post them here.

Making progress

The February update to the website is checked and ready to go.

All the records for my "personal" individuals (as opposed to my Wing records) have been standardized into page protectors and filed away alphabetically by surname into their new ringbinders. Before it was a different system depending on which grandparent's line I was looking at, none of them alphabetical oddly enough! I've also made a start scanning all the official birth, marriage and death certificates to the computer as before I only had a few in electronic format.

So I'm feeling very virtuous today, at least on the genealogical front.

Stay warm!

I hope everyone in the UK (and Europe) has their heating working fine and are able to stay safely cuddled up at home. While it's very picturesque from a distance, I imagine it's gone a bit beyond a joke now if you're actually putting up with the cold snap day after day.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, may a cool breeze waft your way and a frosty drink magically appear in your hand - I know I'm loving the summer, at least on the days I can lie around and do nothing! My strawberry plants, on the other hand, look a little worse for wear after another hot dry day.

Election fever

Yesterday it was general election time here in New Zealand. Not quite as much razzmatazz as this week's US presidential election, thankfully, nor was there a several-hour-long wait to vote!

I know how much fun visitors to NZ have trying to pronounce placenames, so I'm sure you'll all be delighted to learn that Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga is the new Member of Parliament for the electorate I live in, Maungakieie. (Sam is Samoan rather than Maori)

Isn't it nice to live in a time and place where all adults have the right to vote?

Holiday weekend

It's been a long weekend here in NZ, and I've spent some of it actually spending time with my own, non-Wing, tree. Investigating siblings has proved interesting - it turns out that my COLES great-grandfather had three surviving older brothers who apparently married three RANDALL sisters! At least, they married three girls with the surname Randall all born in Wareham Dorset....

Stood up

The mystery of which film has arrived in at my local LDS family history centre will have to wait until next week. There must have been a mixup or problem because no-one arrived to run the family history centre this evening, so after waiting 20 minutes I gave up and went home.

I should probably devote this unexpected spare time to my own family research. I may however just blob on the couch for a bit and see what, if anything, I fancy doing....

Slow month

What's everyone else been up to research-wise? I haven't been up to a lot myself yet this month, between being busy at work and being busy in the garden with spring planting I've barely had a chance to think about genealogy. Those of you up north are presumably farewelling summer and planning to get stuck into your research over the coming months?

Late last month I ordered some films at the local LDS and they rang today to say one was in, so I do have some Wing-related research to do tomorrow evening. Exactly what it is still a surprise as I forgot to ask which film of the three it was!

1891 census - progress so far

I've been very slack unfortunately - progress seems like too strong a word! And it's already half way through the month, so it may be another month before you see the 1891 census up online. I shall blame the seed catalogues - in the last couple of weeks the new year's seed catalogues have been released so we can spend our winter evenings picking what to grow once spring hits. It's taking me a while to narrow down the tomato selection!

In other news, I've finally managed to get my hands on my own copy of the book Wing As It Was. This features postcards and photographs of Wing and its inhabitants in the late 1800s and early 1900s (there's an index to the names in the book on the website). It's long since out of print, and it's only the second copy I've seen pop up on Ebay in the last three years, so I'm very happy to be the lucky winner this time round.

Oh so cold

We've been having some fairly rubbish weather in NZ over the last month. Barely a day has gone by without heavy rain, or a thunderstorm, or hail, or even a mini-tornado here in Auckland (luckily those are extremely mini and only damage one or two houses each time). It's just too cold to spend any time sitting at the computer when I'm at home so the 1891 census has been sadly neglected over the last week. However I did get some birthplaces nutted out so that's progress!

Emails

I haven't had any emails (well, non-spam emails, I have plenty of spam) for a few weeks now. I think this is probably the universe trying to tell me that I should be finishing all the existing lookups and little research projects that I've started for people lately...........I just haven't felt like staring at my computer screen so nothing's getting done!

Dream families

Ever dream you're doing genealogy research?

This morning, right before my alarm went off, I was puzzling over an 1841 census entry for a HIGGS family. I remember that the father had been recently widowed, and the family could have been a little bit posh as the adult son had not one but two middle names! There's no HIGGS amongst my own ancestors, nor in Wing, so it seems my sleeping brain is actually making up people now!

I do have a HIGGINS ancestor though, perhaps it's a sign I should start looking at the Aston Sandford records to see what I can see......

Crying over spilt milk

I guess it's more blood than milk though - I've been going through the WO363 War Office records reading the WWI records of some of the Wing men. As with other records, there's always a sense of amazement that the records survive at all so you can learn these intimate snippets about someone's life. Some things that brought a tear to the eye:

Thomas CAPP, so keen to do his bit he'd signed up during the Boer War, then later done some Territorial service, then signed up again in WW1, spending 9 months in France even though he was 49 at the time.

Horace John CLARK, a driver with the Royal Engineers who was disciplined after being so tired at the end of one day he had neglected to clean his harness (and then lied to his commanding officer about it)

The letter from Esther BANDY requesting that the medals awarded to her late son Albert BANDY be publicly presented to her.

It is a shame that loss of life from such conflicts continues today. My condolences to the families of the two RAF men who were killed serving in Afghanistan a few days ago, and perhaps we should honour the dead by urging the powers-that-be to ensure that everything possible is being done to minimise the risk of injury to those who serve.

Keeping track

I think I need a better system for keeping track of Wing-related enquiries. I keep intending to look further into a particular family or topic, then get sidetracked by a different enquiry and before I know it I have a collection of half-finished documents and I can't remember where I was up to, what I was trying to achieve, and who I was going to "report back" to!

If you're waiting patiently for me to get back to you on something, it might be an idea to send me a quick email to remind me :)

Swamped in spam

Anyone else getting noticeably more spam over the last couple of weeks? I usually check my email twice a day including checking and clearing out the spam folder each time, but now I'm starting to find each time it's more than a screens-worth, so I must be getting at least 100 spam emails a day landing in Outlook. That's too many to flick through looking for misdirected legitimate emails, so hopefully none of your emails are getting lost in the deluge.