Wills and other purchased electronic/paper documents

I have been thinking for a while that I should have an excel file of the location of wills and other purchased electronic/paper documents that includes the transcription file name and eventually an abstract of the document. I decided to do that yesterday and discovered that I have purchased 65 wills from The National Archives (£3.50 each) plus a number of documents that I have purchased the the Hampshire Record Office. I decided to add in other documents that I have acquired (wills from the Wiltshire Wills site before they started charging (and I will be buying some of there as well that have since come online)) which are useful in my research and I have found them online. Eventually I will purchase the original documents. I discovered that I have transcribed only 1/3rd of the wills that I have purchased from The National Archives - generally I read them and transcribe them when I am working on the family line.

I spent several months last year proving (in Legacy) my lines back to my 3x great grandparents. I am now working on the proofs of my 4x great grandparents - a number of them are done but there is a lot of work to do on others. I do enter information for individuals further back as acquired but my thrust at the moment is the proof of my 4x great grandparents and I am concentrating on that. Yesterdays endeavour was quite fruitful as I moved wills about that I had forgotten about and as my family folder has increased to allow for subfolders for family lines the wills didn't travel to the new folders - they are now there. What still remains to be entered are all the Routledge and Blake documents that I have purchased from Cumbria Record Office and Hampshire Record Office.

I also spent some time entering my fiche for parish registers into Library Thing. I am up to the "L" tab now and the second box. I will try to finish that today. We still have to enter the rest of the music tapes and records and then the living room is completely recorded. Then upstairs to work on Ed's study (5 large bookcases, 1 smaller bookcase and many many boxes), our bedroom with its 4 large bookcases of genealogical material. There are another couple of bookcases and several boxes in the other smaller rooms and then the basement with two large bookcases and we want to enter in the DVDs and Videos that we have. Once that is complete we can then sort the *.xls file and produce subfiles of everything. I want to be able to produce lists of material and name the repository that could be asked if they want the material in the future. All of the parish records will be offered to Christ Church Cathedral Archives first, then Library and Archives Canada, BIFHSGO and if not any of these I want them sent back to the Record Office that I purchased them from. The same for all of the books that I have purchased as I am building up a substantial library of items. All of this material is only useful to people who are researching my family lines :). I keep my family up to date on my progress and include transcriptions.

Yesterday was dancing day and we learned the waltz. I was fumbly at first as I haven't danced the waltz in a long long time. But finally we were whizzing around the floor. Ed dances very well. We need to practice turns in the Fox Trot and in the West Coast Swing. We will work away at that this next week. Cha Cha is the new dance next week. In some ways I wish we would just practice now to perfect our steps but it will be interesting to dance the Cha Cha - I do not think I ever have. I love the Polka but it is usually taught in the more advanced dancing lessons. Perhaps we will join a dancing club (ballroom dancing).

I updated my footnotes on my DNA article and sent it off along with another Member's Interest for BIFHSGO. It is my only volunteerism with BIFHSGO. I want to eventually construct an interesting way to look at the Member's Interests. I would like to do it by county where available and make it more user-friendly. Perhaps this winter will present time that I can use for that. This is my catch-up winter in that I will try not to purchase any new material until I have transcribed everything that I have - I do get led astray on occasion!

I discovered an interesting database on the Devon Genuki site and extracted all the Bishops Nympton wills which included a number of my ancestors. I do have the wills but did not know the source before. It is the Inland Revenue copy of the will. Excellent source.