Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Library Thing and the Gray family of ERY

We spent the day before yesterday dusting (I with my face mask as I sneeze with dust!) and today I will enter the bookcase that we dusted into Library Thing. This is a marvelous tool that lets you have a public or a private library. Most of our books are very old now but we enjoy them. Our newest ones are all on genealogy and we tend to go to a CD/DVD if one is available in preference to buying a book. We have literally thousands of books so much so that our youngest child at the age of seven asked if we lived in a library! Nothing particularly old rather just interesting books that have been published during the last 43 years.

I worked on Great Driffield yesterday as I heard back from a researcher on the Harland family (her grandmother was a Harland) and she has been into the record office there looking at records. She traces back to Timothy Harland bc 1700 and possibly at Great Driffield and has listed Thomas (the other individual I found baptizing children at Great Driffield) as the brother of Timothy and both sons of a Timothy Harland. This is exciting information and I want to review the film between 1612 and early 1700s when I can get to the family history centre.

I need to work on updates for my talk as well. I am working hard at staying well as I was sick the last talk that I was to give. This will be my first talk in over a year and my last talk. I find they simply take up too much of my time. I am slipping away from being an "authority" on DNA because I want to spend more time on record searching. Amazing that DNA really enticed me into genealogy but in order to really find my family lines I must do all the hard work of reading census, parish records etc on the microfilm/microfiche readers!

I have at least a year's worth of data to transcribe and enter into my records still remaining (the rest of the material collected at Salt Lake City and the new material collected at the Allen County Public Library). I am very pleased with my collections of data. The camera has proved to be an awesome genealogical tool.

I am focusing on the Gray/Cobb family at the moment and their ancestors in the East Riding of York and the parishes of Great Driffield, Hutton Cranswick, Holme on the Wolds, Kilnwick on the Wolds, Etton, Lund, and Cherry Burton for the moment. That almost seems like enough. I have now given Hutton Cranswick Parish Registers a very long look and my husband filmed from the beginning to the 1750s so I can have a longer look now that I know the Gray family was located there and I do not know if it is my Gray family since they do not appear at Cherry Burton until 1710. I am in the midst for Great Driffield and will eventually have the registers copied from the 1550s to the 1800s before I have completed my study.

Cherry Burton early parish register transcriptions are online. I have looked at Lund in the 1700s and 1800s but would like a longer look now. I have briefly glanced at Kilnwick on the Wolds and need a longer look. I have checked Holme on the Wolds for my Gray family and they only appear to be there in the 1770s for the two baptisms. I would need a longer look there as well. Lund and Etton also have had a look in the time frame I was interested in and it may be that I need to look at these two films later as well. I need to relook at Cherry Burton on ancestry for the Gray family.

The relook at Cherry Burton parish registers on Ancestry yielded 14 pages of text where I extracted all the Gray/Grey, Stevenson/Stephenson and Constable entries. These being the names that I have thus far associated with Cherry Burton. I will put the information into families as I find Mary Constable who married Thomas Hilton and their only child Jane who married Robert Grey may well be from Cherry Burton. A little more information on this line would be helpful. They married at Beverley.

Today I shall continue entering books into Library Thing. I may have overestimated the number of books we actually have plus we have given away some boxes of books.

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