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!

Long time no post

Well it's been nearly a year since I posted on here! How time flies when you're having fun!

I am now about to start on another period of maternity leave with the arrival of no 3 - another addition to our family tree - and this means I may have some more time for a bit of genealogy.

I haven't completely ignored my hobby in the last 10 months - I've been thinking more and more about some sort of one name study into TILLIN/TILLING and to this end I've been doing some analysis of census returns. I also had an interesting trip to Ireland and I think I've found a few more of my northern irish ancestors.

I'll leave it short but sweet now and hopefully put together a proper post soon.

Thanks for your patience!

Summary Sunday

Hi all!

I've had a reasonable productive week or two since coming back from the holidays.

I've got caught up in the whole GenealogyWise thing. I think it's going to be a useful tool in the future but will take a while to settle down. At the moment there are so many groups that I think will ultimately fall by the wayside while some are active already. I've joined a few and will let you know about about any progress that I made. So far I've answered some queries about Excel, contacted someone who has information about my husband's BOXALL family and read a lot of comment wall posts.

I've become a GOON! I've been thinking about it for a while and took the plunge this week to join the Guild of One Name Studies. I haven't registered a surname yet but have already found the resources available to members useful. I'm trying to tie up as many TILLINs as I can so hopefully I'll pick up tips from the Guild.

Thanks to Ancestry it's been quite easy to pull together all the TILLIN births and marriages now as they've added a full transcription of the indices for births and marriages - hopefully the deaths aren't too far away. So I've been able to add to some of the aunts and uncles with a few more life events.

Another discovery was that my local library membership also gives me access to some useful sites, including the Times archive, for free and from my home over the internet. So far I've not found much on my initial browse but I'm hoping to discover some stories about my ancestors.

I'm hoping to get some more work done this week so hopefully I'll have some discoveries to tell you about.

PS It was also the start of a new series of Who Do You Think You Are this week - Davina McCall has some interesting ancestors!!

Where does the time go?????

Well I've not updated the blog for a month or so but I've not forgotten about it!!!

We've been away on a couple of great holidays and our main computer died so there are my excuses!

I've managed to do a bit of genealogy though. I'm currently using Ancestry's BMD records to create a database of all TILLIN Births and Marriages to see if I can make some links - it's a bit painful to get right but might provide some interesting links when it's done. I've also got my parents to take some photos of headstones on a recent trip to Ireland so I will be adding them to my tree and may post some on a Tombstone Tuesday.

Not much progress or breaking new ground but at least I'm still doing stuff!!

Also, thanks to Caroline and Linda for the awards - greatly appreciated - will try to live up to them over the next few months!

Hopefully the next post will have something more concrete to talk about....