Extracting marriages from Free BMD

With nearly 20,000 marriages already for the Blake family from Free BMD (nearly 30,000 in total), I worked on the Hampshire marriages last evening. I was extracting the name of the spouse which is a slow effort opening each marriage to find the correct individual. I started at the closest to the present year and from there back to 1911 the surname of the spouse is listed with the record so is quite straightforward to find. This will take a while to do and once back to 1911 I will then try to use the census to further extract the correct marriage partner. These will all be numbered HAM-# and there are 2714 marriages in Hampshire alone. However all of these marriages should fit into Blake families in the census  or that I can fit into families using Free BMD births where the maiden name of the mother is noted from 1911 on. These groups of marriages under a particular set of parents will then become HAM (or the county where they are then found)-Blake-#. Again all of these HAM(or other)-Blake-# groups will come together and I am still considering how to group them and suspect it will again be by county so that the next designation would be Blake-HAM-# with the number ever diminishing as families fold back together. It is an interesting theory which will be put to the test. Eventually I hope to have the "base" counties for Blake families so that the next level back will again need to be slightly different and perhaps I will be able to go for Blake-Ham-Andover-#. I am trying to see how this will all fit together. I will only carry one generation for the female Blake lines (i.e. their children) but will drop any further descendants as this is a Blake one name study.

For the 1911 on grouping I can extract the Births and Deaths and also fit them into the family lines since both spouses' surnames are listed. Whether I do this concurrently I have not yet decided.

The next question is how to record all of this data. Do I use Legacy or do I move to another program for this study? I will use excel to record my numbers but in grouping them into families what is my best approach? I have read all of the ideas of other people with their one name studies and each one sounds interesting. I want this to be easy though for someone to pick up after me. The Pincombe study that I inherited was 12 bulletin board sized charts that I am still entering into Legacy. These charts were produced primarily by work of mouth with the errors that can and did enter in - my own family being incorrect. A lot of the delay in my entering all the Pincombe data is checking each individual entry in Ancestry, in parish registers, etc. A big help for this will now be the Devon records on Find My Past. I need to assign some time each day to working on Pincombe. The Lambden one name study is pretty much in abeyance as I hope that someone comes along and wants to pick that one up. I have actually no tales or stories to go on for this family and it suffers as a result. The only item is that my grandfather had told me that one of his great grandmothers was nearly 100 when she died and still working - I did find her and she was 96 when she died and listed still as a shepherd on the census in 1861. 

On to proofreading the Upper Clatford transcription. I am anxious to start the Abbotts Ann transcription.

Sproxton - BMDs, Census

I have a project in mind that involves me reading old text so I am reading that intermittently and extracting Sproxton members from FreeBMD, IGI and the Census. I have both Ancestry and FindMyPast so I use them together to find my people and then save them to my computer for future family assembly. This will be the first time that I have selected a name and decided on collecting all the information on that name for a one name study from scratch. Both my Pincombe and my Siderfin study had a lot of material assembled when I took them on at the Guild of one name Studies. I will wait awhile to take on Sproxton (if I ever actually do a one name study on this surname). Free BMD has 146 births in almost a 100 year interval, 88 marriages (that is less than 2 births to a marriage!), and 82 deaths. At least the births are exceeding the deaths by a good percentage. On the other hand this was a very small family in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s so not so many people who are old actually. From the IGI I found 104 baptisms between 1686 and 1890 (13 are patron entries which I usually ignore but in this case I have entered them and marked them as such since this is a very small family), 60 marriages between 1605 and 1892 (11 are patron entries and six between 1837 and 1892 are likely duplicates), and 3 burials all patron entries. I will be adding the data from the parish registers that I have extracted as well. The baptisms go back to 1653 at Hutton Cranswick and are missing from the IGI. All in all a very interesting sideline while I work on the wills.

We went shopping and found some interesting DVDs to watch and then took a 10K bicycle ride.

Tomorrow I hope to start transcribing the wills and continuing to extract data for the Sproxton family.