Fashion of our Ancestors

Westfield shopping centre in London has posted this video on You Tube of all the different styles of clothing and dance in the last 100 year.
I wonder how many of these outfits are similar to the clothes my ancestors may have worn?
I know that some of the more recent ones are similar to clothes I've worn!

New blogger app

Blogger has just released an iphone app. I downloaded it to my ipad to try out in case I see something of interest when I'm out and about. So far so good but not quite as easy as using the traditional keyboard.
It does allow for photos to be uplaoded straight from the ipad which may be a useful feature. I've added a photo of the Giant's Causeway.
I will see if I find it useful and let you know.

ePetition for Research Copies of BMD Certificates

I followed a tweet to this interesting ePetition about the possiblity of research copies of birth, marriage and death certificates.

I think this would be a good idea because sometimes the certificate is just being ordered for the data held within it and it seems like a lot of money just to get to this. But I would hope that you would still be able to order the "proper" certificates as it's always interesting to see exactly what was written down at the time and sometimes there are little notes that can provide further information.

What do you think? I've signed the ePetition would you?

A bit of a riddle...

After speaking to my mother-in-law at the weekend it appears that she never knew her Granddad, Samuel Molloy. The story goes that after getting married to Margaret and having 4 children he just disappeared.

Well, obviously I like a challenge so the next day I started doing a little bit of digging and guess what I found - Samuel Molloy went to Canada! I found the passenger list of the SS Megantic (on Ancestry) and there he is. It doesn't look like he was planning on coming back either as he has answered yes when asked if he intends to live permanently in Canada. He doesn't hide the fact he's married either as he's described as husband. There is some writing that seems to mention wife but I can't read it - can anyone decipher it?So, now I'm obviously interested in Canadian records as I'd like to know what happened to Samuel once he got to Canada. I don't think the rest of the family ever went out to Canada so I wonder if he got remarried or how long he lived etc. Any tips on Canada would be great!

September Update

I'm starting a Pharos course this week about organising - it's only 3 weeks long but I'm looking forward to it. I thought I would try a short course first to see how it all works and if it will fit in with our hectic family life. It is all online and has a forum and a weekly chat session. This course appealed to me as I'm hoping it will provide me with some useful tools for both my one name study and my own research.

I received the FlatCapsandBonnets CD promptly after ordering it and it was good -lots of searchable pdf's of books. I would recommend taking a look and for less than £5 it does provide a useful resource.

My father-in-law scanned in some old photos from his collection. So now I have some cool old photos of my husband's Gt Grandfather's (Charles William TILLIN) wedding. There is a family story that his Gt Grandmother (Ada Mary HERON) was jewish but I don't have any proof of this. All of the family were baptised in the local parish churches so I'm not sure if this will turn out to be a bit of a family myth.

Here are the happy couple surrounded by friends and family in 1917 in Streatham.

FlatCapsandBonnets.com

After reading the latest LostCousins.com newsletter I've purchased the Berkshire CD from FlatCapsandBonnets.com.

This site has CDs containing parish records from many different counties.

I'll review the CD once it arrives as seems like a good way to investigate some new sources at a reasonable price.

Trying out ScribeFire

As usual, life has got in the way of blogging but I have been plodding along with data collection for my One Name Study.

In an attempt to get more productive I have downloaded ScribeFire,  an add-in to Firefox, so that if I see something interesting it should be able to just pop a quick message on here. This is my first attempt so let's see how it goes!

TILLINs in the Births Index 1837-1915

I have been making a start on the data for my One Name Study.

I've now transcribed properly all the TILLINs in the birth indices from 1837 to 1915 (transcribed by FreeBMD but accessed via Ancestry.co.uk). I've also transcribed any TILLINGs and TILLENs if they appeared on the same page as I think they are common misspellings or possible derivatives. I will need to come back to this record set at some point to make sure I've transcribed all the people who have a mother with TILLIN as their maiden name.

It's been quite satisfying to realise that I already had records of most of them - maybe from a census - but it feels good to have a proper list.

The next record set I'm going to tackle is the Births Indices for 1916-2005. These will take longer due to the maiden names.

I am adding each record to my Family Historian tree and allocating a Custom ID to each individual so that I can hopefully tie up individuals over time. Do you have a Custom ID method? Where do you keep your records? How do you collect data from Record Sets?

Creating my TILLIN One Name Study web page

As mentioned before I registered the surname TILLIN with the Guild of One Name Studies last Saturday at WDYTYA Live.

Tonight, I set up my profile page and you can see it here.

By setting up the page I realised that I need to approach the analysis from a more analytical point of view. For example, how many TILLIN families/individuals were in the 1841 census compared to the 1901 census? What data do I actually have? What locations in the country do the TILLINs seem to come from?

So, guess what I'm off to do now...

WDYTYA Live 2011

So, after a bit of a break I'm back! Genealogy has taken a bit of a back seat over the last few months with the arrival of my 3rd child. Anyway I managed to get a ticket for Who Do You Think You Are Live at Olympia last weekend and spent a few hours of child free family tree time.

The night before I had taken a good look at the WDYTYA Live website and decided on the stands I wanted to visit. I knew that I had a short time scale as I was due to meet friends for lunch in central London so I wanted to make the most of my time.

I arrived at Olympia on Saturday 26th February at 9.30am and trooped off the underground with everyone else straight into the end of a queue. The queue seemed long but was constantly moving and within 5 minutes I had got through the front door. This was the point where my research came in handy - I immediately headed upstairs to pick up some tickets for a talk at 11am. But, the queue was long and I didn't want to waste any time and I knew from a previous visit that I would be able to stand at the back and listen so I headed off to the military area.

We have a ROBBINS ancestor who was part of the Royal Garrison Artillery in Gibraltar so I chatted to a guy on the Royal Artillery Museum stand. I bought a couple of books to provide a bit of background and a booklet about tracing military ancestors.

As it was still early I spent 5 minutes chatting to a guy on the PRONI stand and we worked out that to continue tracing my GUTHRIE roots there may be some estate management papers in the archives. So maybe one day I'll be able to go to Belfast and investigate that further.

Then it was off to the Guild of One Name Studies. I have been a member for a couple of years but after speaking with Corinne I took the plunge and registered my TILLIN one name study. I will let you know when my profile page is up and running.

Next door was the North of Ireland Family History Society which I joined as an associate member - I'm looking forward to their bi-annual publication and possibly doing a bit of research in Coleraine when I'm over there in August.

After a quick pause for a drink, I stopped at the Berkshire Family History Society where we found some TILLINs on their Marriage and Burial Indices. I didn't buy the CDs but I'm considering it as I know that the bulk of my TILLINs are from this county.

Finally I listened to the talk by D. Josh Taylor on organising. I missed the first 10 minutes but the part that I heard was really useful. I'm hoping to get hold of the handouts from the website at some point as there was quite a lot to take in.

And with that it was time to head off into Central London. I'd had a quick genealogy fix and enjoyed chatting with everyone. I think I'm getting braver and found that actually speaking to people made the WDYTYA experience much more fun. I also have 3 areas to focus my research on for the next few months which will hopefully stop me going off on too many tangents!