Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Long Term Care meeting and continuing with the Andover Parish Registers

We attended a meeting on Long Term Care and financial implications of Long Term Care versus Senior Citizen Residency. Our plans are to stay in our house for another ten years but it is good to stay abreast of all the options. Now that my sprained knee has recovered and we both remain in good health we can manage this place. Putting on new windows which do not require external maintenance has been a really forward step eliminating the necessity of having to work on a ladder at the second storey level. We need to do our living room floor with hardwood and then all the floors have been redone in the house. I occupy part of the living/dining room area with my computer and genealogy material and that works very well. I am hoping by being so visible to keep down the paperwork and my idea was to mostly have everything online in my Legacy file and so far that has worked very well. I do maintain skeleton trees on Ancestry and Find My Past but my principal trees are on my own computer in Legacy. The trees on the paid subscription services simply give me the ability to search on these main lines readily using the power of the searching tools on these subscription services.

The lecture yesterday was interesting as it was principally directed at people with older parents in need of Long Term Care rather than at newly retirees which we are more or less with my husband retired late 2004 and I retired January 2007. We are both over 65 now which makes us officially seniors and I have my "old" card as does he. It is an interesting concept to have a card that says that you are over 65 since you are collecting the Old Age Pension.

I did decide to take on Regional Representative for the Guild of One Name Studies Eastern Region of Canada. I am trying to step down from the Hampshire Genuki webpages and that is in a sort of process. I asked the person who took over the Church database to consider the possibility. Since the pages are generated there isn't much to do. I am finding that this new generation of web pagery is more than I want to take on (i.e. my mind doesn't seem to get around it :) ).

Continuing with the Andover Parish Registers I am now into the Marriage portion of this 3rd Register and it includes Banns. The various Justice of the Peace who are marrying are also recording the parish of the bride or groom if different from Andover St Marys Parish which is an excellent addition. There are many many banns for this parish probably as much as twice the number of marriages. I expect this will be a good file online eventually.

I am now up to 5867 baptisms (end of 1684 so just five years shy of 100 years of baptisms at Andover), 854 marriages and that is up to November 1656, 76 Banns and this is now a new section and 2606 burials to the end of the 2nd register. The burials are still to do in this register and will follow the marriages and banns. I am now on the fourth row of the second fiche (image 4). There remains 20 images on this fiche and then about 50 images on the third fiche for Parish Register 3. Perhaps I will finish the 3rd Register in November. I then have some work to do on other material (extraction of the Bishops Nympton information into an excel file for one) plus I want to do some French Canadian Research that I have been thinking about. I should start the 4th Parish Register for Andover in the New Year and it has special interest for me all the way up to 1730 when Joseph Blake is born/baptized at Andover. I want to see if he is the only possible Joseph Blake at Andover in this time period as doing the French Canadian Research has honed my skills even more so and I need even more proof now for each step of the way.

Andover is a growth area with baptisms always exceeding burials. Eventually I will chart these parishes year by year in excel to show baptisms, marriages and burials year by year.

Whilst working through this batch I discovered that the marriages from 1659 to 1673 are not in chronological order within the fiche. Hopefully they will appear later although they are not indexed on the IGI so possibly they are missing. I shall watch for them. This is not a bad period for me to be missing marriages as Thomas married to Mary Spring would likely have only been born between 1655 and 1690. He would not likely have married by 1673. Unfortunately the marriage entry for Thomas and Mary is a one liner with no details other than that the priest recorded the parish of residence if it wasn't Andover and did mention if one of the parties was a widow or widower. Such methodical entering can be most helpful plus he has immaculate writing and I can hardly wait to reach the next Register! The last page of fiche 2 is particularly difficult however there are only 50 images to go after this one (the third fiche) so not too bad. The second one has gone amazingly fast. The details recorded for the banns and the marriages will be most helpful to someone I am sure.

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