Guilty conscience

Haven't blogged for a bit. *hangs head in shame*

Forgot the Winging It blogiversary AGAIN this year (it was 3 Nov). *shuffles feet*

Don't even mention that Moving Target 2012 list over there on the right that was supposed to be keeping me focused this year.

And it's the beginning of the month as well, which means an update is due for one of my other websites, the One Place Studies website.

I have been knitting up a storm though. I imagine that my Nana and Grandma and a long line of female ancestors are nodding with approval and wanting to fondle all those pretty yarns we have to knit with these days.

But in the back of my mind I know that the end of the year is approaching, and I need to come up with a genealogy research plan for my Christmas holidays before it's too late. I really should actually use that Find My Past international subscription that I picked up super-cheap before it runs out! The only genealogy thing I've done lately is try to work out how to print out from Family Historian a COLES family tree showing just the boys. My brother's giving me a nephew in 2013!

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

The moving target - other targets

There's some other, non-Wing genealogical goals I have this year:

Version 5 of Family Historian is due out next month. I plan to upgrade to this version. Furthermore, I plan to actually read the manual and work through any suggested tutorial material. The mailing list for this software inevitably makes me feel like a complete newbie as I simply haven't explored diagrams, queries and the like in any logical manner, and there's no point having top-class software if you aren't using it properly. 2012 is the year!

Another good idea would be to work through and update Family Historian by family so that sources and the like are consistently recorded. I have a bad habit of getting underway, then putting things to one side and returning three months later only to have no idea which family I was working on and where I might have been up to. For some reason I seem to have a mental block as far as getting a good system going for tracking that sort of thing.

I'd like to write some more articles for the One Place Studies website. While maintaining the index section of this website doesn't take too much time, I didn't add as much new content as I'd like in 2011. 

I should also do some actual family history work on my own actual family tree. Poor neglected thing. I think I should just pick a couple of surnames that I haven't really worked on much (both on my Dad's side, as I 've already written up mini-books for Mum's side) and get stuck in revisiting the information I have, updating Family Historian, then expanding their stories. WILLSON of Lincolnshire and Islington, and PACKER of Sandford, Devon, step on up!

No census for you

We all know the pain of discovering that there is no census for us. No, our ancestors lived in jurisdictions that didn't keep their census returns, like Ireland or New Zealand. Or the census was either never taken, like England in 1941, or their records were collateral damage in wartime. Sometimes even we just get desperately unlucky and find our ancestors were living in the small pockets around the country where the census records for that year have perished or are inexplicably missing.

Our knowledge and understanding of our ancestors' lives are enriched by these records - a happy byproduct of the original purpose of the census, to gather statistical data for future planning. As genealogists we actually get excited about completing our modern-day census returns, contributing to this process and leaving behind this official record, just as our ancestors did.

The New Zealand 2011 census has been cancelled in the wake of the latest earthquake to devastate the city of Christchurch. There is no census for us. I'll be completing my forms anyway (I had been looking forward to doing this online, but the old-fashioned way will suffice), and filing them away along with a copy of this article announcing the cancellation. It's a pretty sad relic of this year to leave behind.

To explore strange new worlds

I'm going to be seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where I haven't gone before - to Ireland! Not literally, just genealogically. I have signed up for the National Institute of Genealogical Studies "Research: Irish Ancestors" four-week course.

I wanted to do a course in something I knew as little as possible about, and Ireland certainly fits the bill. The couple of formal genealogical courses I have done to date covered topics I already knew quite a lot about (after the best part of a decade researching you do pick up a thing or two), so I wanted to stretch myself this time round. And I had a discount to do another course through the National Institute, so..........

I recently visited my aunt who has an Irish husband, which gives me a line to practice my skills on - should be interesting to see how things differ from my traditional stomping ground of England.

And lo, the archetypal ancestor smiles beatifically upon me

Or maybe not.

Nevertheless, I have been blessed by the current round of Ancestor Approved awards. Thanks to Geniaus and Mike - mwah! Go check their blogs out!

As long-time readers will know, I'm not one for playing by the official rules on these things, and I don't have any cider today. Boooo! I do have a sugar-rush though, so here's a surprising thing I learned about one of my ancestors this week (mostly to name-drop, you understand).

James POULTER (1809-1873) from Farnham, Surrey, somehow managed to progress from ag lab to farmer sometime between 1843 and 1847. Odd, no? Firstly, how did he get the money? Didn't inherit any, his daddy hadn't popped off yet and he was only an ag lab too. Secondly, what's someone as posh as a farmer doing hanging out in my family tree? You're making my hundreds of ag labs feel bad. Thirdly - dude, you were a farmer. How can you have no will? For several brief, shining days, I lived in hope that when the time came to check the probate index, there you'd be, but no. For shame, James.

And now to pass it on....if your genealogy blog is feeling sad and neglected without the Beatific Ancestor glaring at you, then go ahead, plug your blog in the comments, and she can come and live with you.

National Institute for Genealogical Studies

Hi everyone! No, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet, but it has been summer holidays here in NZ and the computer is not so appealing then. I did do two genealogical things of note though.

The first was the introductory course (Methodology part 1) at National Institute for Genealogical Studies based in Canada. Louise from the National Institute spoke at the History and Genealogy Roadshow I attended here back in November (and apparently never blogged about), and I signed up then for this freebie course. I was curious to see how an alternative online genealogical education provider handled things, and I was just as pleased with this one as I was with Pharos. The materials were excellent, albeit they didn't really tread any new ground for me but that was hardly the course's fault, just a factor of my experience. The interactivity of the course didn't seem as high as Pharos which was definitely more fun to do. Once you have completed one module within your National Institute course you are given access to the next module, so you don't have to wait for the next week for the materials to be given out as you do with Pharos - the flipside to that is that you don't get the same sense of camaraderie with your classmates as you do with Pharos when you are all working with the same material at the same time. Each course from the National Institute is offered more frequently (generally every two months) than Pharos at present, which is handy to know if you feel the need to upskill quickly on an area. I won't comment on value for money, as the actual cost for you may well be dependent on the exchange rate at the time, as it is for me.

The second was a vist to my aunt, who lives too far away for regular visiting, but doesn't live so far away that I should leave it so many years between visits - she's in the same country, for goodness sake! She's also interested in the family tree so I took down trees of the four branches for her grandparents based on what I've done so far (and had a crash course on diagrams in Family Historian in the process). I hope to make enough progress on that side this year to be able to write it up and share it with the family properly. While down that part of the country I also got to meet my cousin's newish baby - another leaf on the tree!

Family Historian - data conversion comments

Now that I have "real" genealogy software, I had to convert my existing data. The initial steps were relatively simple - export from PAF to GEDCOM, import GEDCOM into Family Historian, hope for the best. Unless a really obvious error is flagged by the import process, you can only look to see that everything looks approximately okay (because we all have photographic memories and can remember all the details of the hundreds or thousands of people in our family tree off the top of our heads, right?), then look at some sample individuals you do know well to see exactly how everything has translated across into the new software.

First comment: I really should have some official sources for myself, my brother and my parents. My dad was the only one with an external source - look, I can prove he exists as I have a copy of the birth announcement in The Times (London). Turns out I (or, rather, my genealogy software a.k.a. my other brain) even know what hospital he was born in!

Second comment: for census records I had previously been adding two separate events/attributes in PAF, one for the census and one for the residence(assuming the address was more specific than just the name of the village). Family Historian enables you to attach both a place AND an address to any fact, so I would now need to go through and consolidate the census information together into one fact. Also on the address front, there's a nice feature to list all the places in your database, identify the near-duplicates, check out which records they are attached to, and tidy them up so they are recorded exactly the same if appropriate - nice!

Third comment: I use the Notes field in PAF to record the research process for that person, search terms I used, records I know exist and might be useful but that I can't access, general comments or snippets about that person, and more. This has come across a single note for each person but can now be split up into different types of notes in Family Historian (including notes that apply to the family group rather than the individual).

Fourth comment: I seem to be avoiding looking into the whole source citation area - I suspect there is some cleanup required on this part of the conversion. A perfect time to tidy up all those sources, but possibly a big job. I'll ease into it by reading the chapter in the Family Historian guidebook first!

A Christmas present for me

I've finally done it - I've purchased genealogy software. After almost a decade of genealogy in my life, it was certainly time! No longer will I putter along in PAF (although I'm sure it will continue to sit on my USB drive in case I ever need to refer to it while out and about), I have a shiny new copy of Family Historian to use instead.

Of course, timing not being my strong point, I chose to purchase this now knowing full well I'm going to be reformatting the computer in a few weeks time so will have to reinstall it. But, on the other hand, shiny Christmas present for me!

When the shiny present feeling has worn off, I'll be sure to post on the trials and tribulations of converting and checking my PAF data.

Forget-me-not

Nana
17 July 1927 - 6 November 1990

Many colours of the rainbow

Inspired by Sussex boy John over at The Wandering Genealogist, I present a statistical representation of the birthplaces of my 3xgreat-grandparents.


It makes for a particularly unattractive graph colour-wise, no? Nonetheless, I shall embrace my diversity, as it turns out not every road leads to Buckinghamshire.

Twiglet on the tree

I'm an aunty!

What's in your inbox?

I'm still here, honestly, I'm just very quiet online this month! I've been very busy at work (the day job, not genealogy), so the month is flying by very quickly. Any spare snippets of genealogy time I've had have been devoted to my WHITEs of Dorset and the LATHWELL one-name-study.

Some interesting genealogical emails have also come my way this month. The first was an enquiry about the likely location of the Royal Oak pub in Ascott, which I was able to answer thanks to some previous information provided by David. The second was a possible candidate for John BULL who appears on the Wing War Memorial for WWII - there's a chance a single marriage certificate might be enough to prove or disprove the connection, if only I had unlimited funds to look into such leads! And the last was an email from someone researching the history of their home in Deddington Oxfordshire - one of the earliest owners in the mid-17th century was a JAKEMAN, which is my family, but it's 40 years or so earlier than my own research currently goes back. I must find time for a library visit to relook at the OFHS parish register transcripts and see if the link can be made....

Has anyone else had any interesting genealogical emails lately?

NZ Family History Fair 2010

From what I saw attending on the one day only, the organisation and execution of the first NZ Family History Fair was excellent. One of the seminars I attended was by the newly-elected-President of the NZ Society of Genealogists Fiona Brooker, who seemed particularly lovely and has awesome digital scrapbooking skills! I'm part-way through a project to name my grandad's photos by loading them into Photoshop Elements pages, looks like I must try harder...

My impression of the seminar list before going, that these weren't targeted at or that useful for the more experienced genealogist, was probably correct based on the sessions I attended (which were mostly from the Sharing My Past For the Future stream rather than the more-obviously-beginner streams). It would be interesting to see what the experience levels of attendees were - most people seemed to be NZSG members attending for the whole weekend so you would think that there would be a reasonable level of experience there. While the seminars were okay, I don't know that I would go out of my way in future. I also didn't purchase anything from exhibitors/retailers as there wasn't much that was relevant to my area of interest - one of the problems of living in one country and researching solely in another.

Meeting some online people in real life was worth the trip to Hamilton though - I met up with Brett, the Photo-Sleuth at lunch, after a false start where we thought we were in the same seminar in the morning. I was therefore smiling optimistically at every lone male entering my seminar, but then it turned out Brett was in an entirely different room....

I was also able to meet Seonaid Lewis, the family history librarian from the Auckland City Library - I'll be sure to pop into the library again sometime soon.

I do think that I can learn more about my ancestors and their lives (and how to research my ancestors and their lives) by doing what I've been doing on my own, rather than being a member of NZSG or attending any generic genealogical education events, and I definitely get more energy, enthusiasm and ideas from the geneablogging and tweeting community. So I'll keep on doing what I'm doing, starting today when I have the day off work!

NZ Family History Fair

New Zealand is having its first Family History Fair! No longer will I cast envious sideways looks at bloggers reporting back from Who Do You Think You Are in London, or Jamboree in California (have fun this weekend, you guys), now I can be one of them......

I'll just be heading down to Hamilton for the Sunday. After perusing the seminar line-up, discarding those specific to NZ or Australian research and those that look like they might be targeted more at the beginner, I've chosen the following:

* Genealogy Privacy Issues
* Researching in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (mainly to see if they mention one-place-studies as a valuable resource!)
* Digitally Publishing Your Family Story
* Digital Photography - Blessing or Curse?
* Organising and Preserving Your Research

This will hopefully leave enough time to check out the exhibitors - more of the overseas big names are attending than I would have expected.

If you're in NZ, are you going?

(Updated to add - must brush up on Amy's Rock Star's Guide To Genealogy Conferences!)

The cancellation button

I really did it, I followed through on my decision to cancel my Ancestry.co.uk subscription.

Incidentally, the good folks at Ancestry must keep an eye on the blogosphere as they spotted my initial post and lodged an incident report offering to check on my renewal quote as the prices apparently haven't increased in the last year. I've checked that the amount I was quoted for my renewal was the correct current price, so that suggests I might have been undercharged for some reason last year (I have the confirmation emails for each year from 2006 onwards so I know exactly what I was charged each year). So I shall count my blessings for the enjoyment I've had over the last year, and move on to focus on other resources in the coming year.

Some other websites that I didn't mention last time that also offer a range of
online English records are:
* British Origins who offer a reasonable 72-hour access package. In the past I've found their various indices never provide quite enough information in the index to be sure it's my own family member, but I may well do another 72-hour stint at some stage to see what I can find.
* FamilyRelatives.com doesn't have anything at the moment that looks like an intriguing lead (sadly none of my lot were posh enough for public school) but I'll be keeping an eye on any new databases they add.
* Roots UK has surname distribution maps that may well tempt me.....
* The National Archives Documents Online services has more than just the PCC wills and it will be interesting to see what pops up in future. I've just spotted some free-to-download poor law union correspondence - if I find anything in here that covers the poor law unions my ancestors lived in that correspondence will be colourful background reading.

Plodding on

As promised, I've been plodding on making sure I'm getting as much research done as possible in Ancestry.co.uk before my subscription expires. In a move that's sure to prove foolhardy, not everything is making it into my PAF file at the time I discover it - I now have a sturdy stack of printouts to add "when I get around to it", mostly for siblings of my direct ancestors. There's been some lovely discoveries, like signatures of witnesses on marriage certificates, and yesterday I even located a long-standing missing entry for one of my ancestors in the 1861 census (still no sign of the elusive Elizabeth Gardiner in 1901 though, grrrr).

I've also remembered to grab the last couple of WO363 military records for Wing-born men, so Wing has not been forgotten.

London addresses

I'm currently wrestling with exactly how to load London addresses into my genealogy file. This isn't such a problem for non-London addresses as the parish and village are generally the same and the street name is often non-existent.

In the source attached to any event I've been quite specific in listing full parish name (eg St David West Holloway), then the broad suburb (eg Islington), then county (eg Middlesex). However in terms of actually filling in the address field of the event the lines get blurred.

Part of the problem I think stems from the fact that PAF only has a certain amount of space to print addresses, so I know it will abbreviate parts of it to initials only when I print out the individual's summary page - understandable, but useless in practice. This means I have a tendency to try and abbreviate things myself - no point putting "24 Alfred Street, St David West Holloway, Islington, Middlesex" when I know on printouts it will just show "24 Alfred Street, SDWH, I, Middlesex". I'm thinking I might change my self-imposed rule and just put the Chapman code for the county instead of spelling out the county in full but this won't get me back that many characters.

Another part of the problem is the fact that I'm not a Londoner myself so my geographical grasp of suburbs is probably pretty shaky - it bugs me that I don't know if I'm using the name it would actually be known as in practice! I've just printed out most of the sections of this excellent 1877 parish map, and I think I could standardise this by using the poor law union name as the suburb name.

My brain also wants to use "London" rather than "Middlesex", even though London should only really be used for the City of London area.

And don't even get me started on the frequent parish boundary changes and name changes for those London parishes!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how they approach this? Do I really need to include the parish name as part of the address so long as I've got it in the source? Am I overthinking the whole thing?

I'm Ancestor Approved!

Thanks to the lovely Sheri over at The Educated Genealogist for the nomination. [UPDATED - also to the lovely Greta at Greta's Genealogy Blog *blush*]

Disclaimer: official rules state disclosure of 10 things you have learned about your ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened you, plus ten other blogger nominations. Ten seems an AWFUL lot, and it's Friday evening and I've already opened a cider, so here's three things I've experienced from this week's research in the (virtual) London Metropolitan Archives, and a virtual cider for everyone who reads this blog - thanks for being part of my online genealogical journey.

AAAAAA! - I discovered new (shortlived) baby siblings for my grandmother and great-grandmother. Don't you love those genealogical discovery moments when you go "aaaaa!" just a bit too loud and scare the cat? Hilda Alice WHITE (1903) and Edwin Leslie HALL (1904), welcome to the family!

OOOOOOH - "Blown Up" or "Kill'd by Explosion of Powder" is not something you want to read on a burial record. I'm glad to live in a time when the chance of being blown up by the local gunpowder mill is fairly minimal.

HMMMMMM - I found a probable baptism for my Charles AUGER which claims his parents were George and Lucy Auger - except Lucy was unmarried according to subsequent census records. Frankly I'm more inclined to believe Lucy managed to get away with telling fibs when baptising Charles.

Ancestry.co.uk - The Decision

Today my car had to go to the doctor for the third time this year. I believe this is the universe assisting me with my Ancestry subscription renewal decision - so the decision is in, and it's a No.

This means I have to stay very focused and organised over the next three weeks to maximise my access before it ends. I've been spending quality time with the London Metropolitan Archives databases this week and have found many useful parish register entries. In particular I was very happy to see that a sizeable chunk of the records for the two churches in Twickenham 1800-1900 were now included, as I have multiple lines going through there, and going page by page through all the pre 1812 unindexed entries for Twickenham St Mary's has also proven valuable - although sadly my Alexander and Jane HUGHES appear to have married prior to 1800 (or perhaps not in Twickenham, as I have found a potential Alexander and Jane marrying in St James Picadilly Westminster in April 1800 - from what I've seen this name combination isn't common so it just might be them).