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.

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.

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 20 Nov 2008

Today was supposed to be transcription of the Manor Records of Upper Clatford but I decided to take a look at the Protestation Returns for Cumberland. I already have Bewcastle translated as I purchased it from the Carlisle Record Office a few years ago. I quickly transcribed the Bewcastle Return just to refresh my memory on the earlier writing in this part of the country. I then decided to do Lanercost as that parish is my other strong interest in Cumberland along with Farlam and Arthuret. Lanercost was ten images and all but one were quite sharp. Fortunately I overlapped quite a bit so was able to compensate for the one slightly blurry image. I set up my headings in Excel - Ward, Quarter, Status (Sworn or other), Surname, Forename, Suffix and Standing/other information. I have all the Tweddle and Robson names already from this parish which was about 50 names but the time that I completed the transcription (4 hours later!) I had 271 names from the four quarters - Lanercost, Askerton, Triermanie, and Burdoswell - and Kirkcambeck was also included in this return. I will go back and carefully proofread as there were about 20 that did not fit into the usual names and the letters were not well formed. There were a number of aliases (about 25) and a few locations noted. The number of different surnames was likely close to 70 and will determine that later after proofreading.

I am thinking that this would make a good submission to the Cumbria Newsletter and will think about doing that in January.

I will get back to working on the Manor documents for Upper Clatford this evening. We are putting together a slide show of our trip to England to show to some people who had us over to see their slides for Ireland and another couple. We had over 5,000 images which have been reduced to 1,200 images which is still quite a few but they cover a lot of territory. We will likely go with that many. Our family has over time watched all 5,000, sometimes just glancing!

I am now accumulating the evidence for proving the 4x great grandparents - I actually have four done already of the 64. I am missing material on 8 people although I have ordered fiche and books to help to do so. I have at least 1 that I will not be able to solve likely as the father of one of my 3x great grandmothers is unknown unless it is in the Bastardy Orders which I have not yet checked.

Taking 4 hours to work on 10 images lets me think that working on the 2500 images from Salt Lake City will take me all winter. Certainly the 30 slides for the Upper Clatford Manor Records are going to be a challenge. The writing is Secretary Style and is one of the hands that I have not done a lot of work with although the letters are very well formed.

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 10 Nov 2008

Today was a sorting day looking at the various items that I brought back and deciding an orderly manner in which to transcribe or otherwise interpret them. My excel file of all the images includes the picture number, the area that was being researched (usually the village/town/city but sometimes the county only), the item that was being photographed and the date. That way I can sort it by image number, area, item or date. In retrospect it will be a workable system. Setting it up initially was a quandry as I didn't know at the beginning how many pictures I would take.

I decided to update my Legacy file as I never do that when I am on the road or away from my main computer researching. I always record all the changes in a word file although might actually enter them into the legacy file on my portable computer. I want to maintain the integrity of my Legacy file though and avoid making quick changes that haven't had time to "gel" in my mind. I had obtained a number of baptism, marriage and burial entries and that resulted in my deciding to update my webpage with five new family lines since I had acquired what I consider to be a sufficient number of details. This time it was the Durnford, Ellis, Hemsley, Hilton and Tanner family names that were added. I now have 39 surnames traced back in varying degrees on my webpage. I also have an *.pdf file associated with many of them (still remaining to do for the new additions today) which includes the marriage partner and date for each generation if known. I can extract the Relationship to me chart from Legacy and put it into an *.pdf file for ftp to my webpage. I have found this to be a very worthwhile use of my webspace as I have been receiving the occasional email from people asking about some of my information or whether I know where their family line fits in.

I believe I shall now split my effort a little between the land tax assessments for Devon and Protestation Returns into a table (I copied the originals) for use with my one name studies on Pincombe and Siderfin. I am considering putting my Lambden study in hibernation simply because I haven't had enough time to really get into the study and perhaps someone else will pick up this study if it isn't being worked on by me. Two studies appear to be sufficient work for me at the moment. I have entered four of the twelve charts that I received from the Pincombe one name study that existed before I took the task on and for the Siderfin I have managed to locate and put into family lines most of the Siderfin individuals that I have found in parish and civil records up to 1900 and these I have added to the excellent family chart made by James Hooper Saunders in 1910.

I am also planning to spend some time each day now on the Genuki Hampshire webpages. I wanted to go to England and see Hampshire myself before I put too much more effort into the pages. I am now satisfied that I can continue with this project and do it justice - not as much as a native Hampshire person but the best that I can do from afar.