Saturday, January 24, 2009

Landkey Parish Registers - 24 January 2009

I continued transcribing the Landkey Parish Registers and completed up to 1660. I now have 791 baptisms, 310 marriages and 640 burials in my excel database. The marriages have settled down to between 2 and 8 marriages per year. The number of baptisms has decreased to 10 rather than 20 per year. That rather surprised me and I shall see how that progresses. This is during the Cromwell period when a number of the parishes did not keep the registers up but so far I have found the Devon parishes to have done so.

I had a request with respect to my being Online Parish Clerk for Bishops Nympton which I completed. The individual had written to me last year about this time and I had only just completed the first 100 years of the Registers. I said that likely it would take me another year to complete to 1812 (and I was close in that estimation) so I was able to provide him with the data that he wanted plus the data from the mid 1800s which is fairly easy to extract from the registers if the dates are sent. I am going to transcribe that as well but I still need to complete the Banns. I moved away from that for a bit to work on Landkey and other registers since I can readily draw out the material now if people send me the dates that they are looking for. A global search is still not possible past 1812 without some input (IGI up to 1837 and FreeBMD 1837 on).

We went to see "Orfeo Ed Euridice" at Silver City - a direct digital signal from the Met in New York City. A most interesting opera although quite short by usual standards. The clothing was modern and the choreography was quite fantastic. The story line was interesting but the dance was absolutely brilliant. Although the lead signers received most of the applause, if I had been there I would have been clapping for the dancers as well.

This evening my desktop computer appeared to be acting up so I decided to do a complete backup of my files (3.5 hours to copy everything to my Iomega drive) just in case. However, the machine is just fine now. The computer is about five years old so will not likely last a lot longer. I usually acquire the oldest computer as they are passed down and have worn out three in the last seven years that I have been actively working on various items. I started genealogy in 2003 with my courses and that has pretty well occupied all my time since then. Just now I am thinking that I would like to get back to knitting and sewing again so I am starting to restrict my time on the computer to six hours per day. I think next week I will try to decide on knitting patterns for all the wool that I have and begin to knit for 2 hours per day or so when I am watching the television. I also want to spend 2 hours in the afternoon sewing as I also have a stack of material that I bought about 15 years ago that I will now make into other items than the original intent - my children are no longer small but I always bought good lengths so will be able to utilize all of the material eventually. I have a lovely new sewing machine that is programmable that I want to learn to use. Smocking is one of my favourite items and I have a number of items that I want to smock.

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