Coronation fever

The celebrations for the Diamond Jubilee seem to be ramping up in the UK. This weekend is the Queen's Birthday holiday weekend here in NZ, and in honour of both events I'll be cooking Jamie Oliver's "ER's Diamond Jubilee Chicken". This is an update on Coronation Chicken created for Her Majesty's coronation in 1953.

I do have a family treasure with a coronation theme to share. The photo below is one from my great-grandfather George White's "black book", a small notebook of photographs taken in the early 1900s. This particular photo is recorded as "Hackney Coronation Carnival, Japanese Party, July 3rd 1902". Googling this tells me that the carnival had a series of floats depicting the crown and the empire, and was one of a flurry of carnivals, pageants and general celebrations for the coronation of Edward VII. This particular carnival in Hackney should have taken place after Edward VII's coronation on 26 June that year but the coronation was delayed until 9 August - I must check the newspapers and see if the carnival itself was always scheduled for 3 July or if it too was delayed until everyone was sure the new King would survive his bout of appendicitis!

Hackney Coronation Carnival 1902

Russian immigrants

I've had an email regarding Ivan Vassilevitch Arjenovsky, 1900-1963, who has a gravestone in Wing. Does anyone know anything more about the Arjenovsky family, or any other Russian immigrants to Wing for that matter?

World famous (in UK genealogy circles)

Progress report on the Moving Target list: nothing to report. Must try harder!

However I have looked at the BAILEY, INWARDS, and GOSS families in Wing over the last week, and I’m about to look at the PEASE family. If you are connected to any of these and haven’t previously been in touch, please email me.

It’s also been exciting times for one-place studies generally. Roy Stockdill’s article on one-place studies is in the current (May) issue of Family Tree magazine, so do grab a copy if you haven’t already seen it - as well as the physical mag you can also buy a digital copy at PocketMags, via iTunes app, Android, whatever! The article mentions me, and more importantly lots of others working hard on their one-place studies as well as the One Place Study website over at  http://one-place-studies.org/.

April update #2

It seems I'm the April fool - I've found some updates to the website that I prepared in January but never actually uploaded, so here they are! Two updates for the price of one!
 
Interested in the churches and chapels of Wing? There's some additional information from the 1851 Ecclesiastical Census that has been added to the non-conformist pages.

In particular, it's now clear that there were (at least) two dedicated Wesleyan Methodist chapel buildings - one was erected in 1813 and another in 1864. I'm hoping to find some newspaper reports to find out about this process - where exactly was the old chapel? Was it torn down, or converted?

It also now looks as if, although the Burcott Baptist Chapel was formed in 1840, it didn't have a dedicated building until 1845. The Crafton Independent Chapel also wasn't a separate building with regular services, it was an offshoot of Wingrave.

April update

There has been an update to the site this month - the marriages from 1 July 1837 to the end of that year have been added. As you know from my Moving Target 2012 list, I hope to have all the marriages from 1837 to 1851 transcribed and uploaded by the end of the year, along with all those other projects of course!

Next March....

....remind me not to start any projects! I'd decided to work on a wee project seeing how Family Historian (as an example of traditional family history software) could be adapted and used for a one-place study, as well as making a good dent in the 1910 valuation books project, not to mention continuing to process my photos taken last year at my brother's wedding and the associated trip to UK and Antigua (there's a deadline ticking on some vouchers I have to get a photobook printed). Unfortunately every year I underestimate how busy we're going to get at work approaching the financial year end and therefore how much energy I'm going to have left over for personal projects. Yes, I've done it again this year. Maybe next year I'll remember?

1910 valuation books - an update

I see it's been more than a month since I last blogged - quelle horreur! I bet you think I've been busy on the genealogy front, since I clearly haven't been online as much but alas, I have not. But I'm here now, holding myself accountable.

Let's revisit the moving target list. Target 1 was already achieved back in January. Target 2, transcribing the 1910 valuation book for Wing for the Buckinghamshire Genealogy Society, is underway. I've transcribed 25 of the 75 pages. I wasn't keeping track of how long it was taking me, although I think the 20 hours total for the project still seems pretty fair, which means there's around 13 hours to go. That's only phase 1 of that project though. While the columns I've transcribed are those that the BGS require, there are some additional columns in those books that they don't need and I'll be going back and grabbing the information in those as well. It would be good to get all this done by the end of March. It might take a little bit longer before that information makes it to the website though, as I also have the accompanying maps and it would be really good to translate that information into Google Maps or something similar so you can see exactly where the property that your ancestor owned or leased was.

I haven't done anything on the other four targets on the list. Do I get to count this as a win on the grounds that I've evidently resisted the temptation to hop around? Given that I've been pondering a wee side project looking at the use of traditional genealogy software for an OPS, perhaps a pat on the back isn't entirely warranted!