Author Archives: admin
I tend to keep late hours, and this extends my use of lighting. My main Lounge/dining area has 15 40 watt bulbs. Or it did. Now I have 15 LEDs. They cost £6 each and have a claimed life expectancy over 20000 hours. This means they come out at about 30p per thousand hours to REPLACE, compared with… Read More »
Thanks to Esther, from Australia, there is more light on the St Helena connection. We seem to be third cousins, and it was a pleasure to connect up with her by skype over christmas. She had found, and I had missed, that although my 3xgreat grandmother went by Houndsworth in the records on st Helena, her father went… Read More »
One of the halogen down lighters in my kitchen started to flicker – not the bulb, but the transformer…Time for a change. So, I bit the bullet and bought some LED down lighters, made by a firm called JCC. Easy swap for the old units, built in firecans, and only 7 watts instead of 50, so for every… Read More »
Many years ago, my mother repeated something she had heard from her mum – that somewhere in the family history is a slave ancestor. I dismissed this as improbable, many years ago. However, a year or two back, the connection showed up. My great great grandmother was born on the tiny Atlantic island colony of St Helena. Born… Read More »
If you are just embarking on researching your family tree and find it irksome or expensive to use subscription services to search the birth, marriage and death indexes, it helps to remember two things: The first is that those of us that researched in the old index books had to shift 1800 volumes for a single surname over… Read More »
Until the GRO computerised the capture of registration data, the quarterly indexes were compiled by hand. In the earliest indexes, entries are handwritten, later ones are typeset. These indexes used to be in huge books that you could consult at Somerset House, then St Catherine’s house, and finally Myddleton Street, before they were eventually withdrawn, and for pre… Read More »
What have these in common? Well, I find that with my so far limited experience of WordPress, I can write blog posts and update my website with my tablet and the free WiFi connection. Everyone does it of course, so this is nothing new. There is no reason to restrict yourself to blogging in this situation. Creating or… Read More »
The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes, are published by the UK Government and contain a wealth of information useful to genealogists, particularly those researching modern records, as a great number of gazettes from the 20th century are searchable online. Who puts information in the Gazette? Often it is solicitors, and this is where a wealth of family history… Read More »