I am having an interesting day of doing virtually nothing. I am trying to decide what to do this next week as I have the two newsletters ready to go and I had thought I would be working fulltime getting them ready.
I could start transcribing wills again and perhaps that would be a good move. Looking back I was still transcribing in 2017 generally with a few in 2018 and 2019. Checking my Kew file for 2013 wasn't helpful. I did submit the names in the will to the Probate Database at the Guild and that has brought me to my stopping point which was the will of Samuel Blake probated in 1697. I was working my way through the On Board Wills and I have two more to do there (Samuel Blake 1763 and William Blake 1694). That will was blogged on 4 October 2017. But in 2019 I was working on Kent Wills so not my stopping point afterall and there are a goodly number of those that I have not submitted to the Probate Index.
I believe I can see my path now; I must do the Probate index Excel file and then move back to work on the sections of the Wills that I have not yet done. I believe I will do a folder by folder verification looking at the folders I created after the huge download at Kew in 2013. That will clearly let me see what remains to be done with the PCC wills. Then I have another 1000+ that I collected elsewhere that I have mostly not done yet unless they were really old and I wanted them for a specific purpose. It is a long time since I have thought about the wills.
Once completed I will create *.pdf files of them and will contemplate how to put them together in a meaningful way. Diocese or County - I suspect County would be the most useful way to put them together although I tend to work with Diocese probably because I am an Anglican and I do think in terms of Diocese for religious documents. But for anyone looking at a will in a particular area they are probably going to look by County. It might be possible to do two lists but with so many wills it would be a lot of work. Will have to contemplate that for a bit.
My first task will be to create the Excel file for the Probate Index and get that submitted. Because my name is attached to these records I do get requests for information. I then have to explain that yes I have transcribed a particular will but I am not related to these people nor do I know anything particularly about them unless they fitted into a family that became well enough known that I can put them altogether. I do write a fairly long preamble to the transcription but I am considering mentioning that this is all that I know about a particular testator.
Tomorrow probably I will begin. Must go and do my calisthenics. I am now into sort of my winding down plan where I take any project to its final state and then load it up on my website. Eventually I will have to see if Family Search wants any of my transcriptions or Internet Archive. I estimated that my winding down plan might take me as much as ten years which would see me 86 before I had completed all the work. I was meant to start the winding down plan a couple of years ago but time escaped me for quite a while.
With the changes in how I live in life though I actually have more time to work on genealogy and especially long projects. Basically I have all day to apply to it and six to seven hours is really enough in one day. Some times I think I may have bitten off to large a task but I am not a panic driven person tending to just take it one step at a time. So if the eyes hold out and the brain remains functional I am good to go! This lovely post will remind me of what I am doing as I put together a plan. Mustn't forget the taxes though and figuring out why Enbridge isn't billing me. I am still paying Enbridge as the gas is flowing into my house fortunately given the cold temperatures. But it would be much easier if they would bill me. Very nerve wracking all of that!
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