My First Talk

 Genealogy  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

Yesterday I did my first Genealogy talk. I was a small gathering of our church Men’s Group so a good place to do mu first talk on the subject.

Apart from some minor technical problems I though it went reasonably well.

I covered some of the basics of getting started and showed some of the other resources that are out there. In once sense I did not think I had covered much ground the talk lasted between 45 minutes and an hour. I think that it is the sort of thing that the more you do the better you get.

 Posted by at 2:54 pm

An Excellent Result

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Nov 182011
 

I received the results from the assignments I had submitted for the first lecture.

I was really chuffed as I got an A and A-. This was far better than I had imagined I might have done. I feel now that the hard work has all been worth it. Though it sets a high bar when it comes to the next few lectures.

 Posted by at 9:26 pm

Moving on

 Genealogy, IHGS Course  No Responses »
Nov 142011
 

Had quite a busy weekend on genealogy matters.

Firstly, I made a start on lecture two of the IHGS course by going through the lecture notes. Next weekend I plan to start on the first assignment.

In connection with this lecture, I must get in touch with my uncle, as I wish to discover more about his early life and that of my grandfather. The final assignment in this lecture is to write a biography of one of your grandparents.

Secondly, I have agreed to do a talk on genealogy for our men’s group at church. I have thus been spending time working out what I want to say and putting a powerpoint presentation together, including some of the documents I have. I have decided to go through the basics of tracing from marriage certificate to birth certificate to marriage certificate etc. and looking at how the the censuses can help. Further, I will show a sample of other information that can be found.

It will be interesting to gage the reaction, to see if it worth looking to do other talks. Further to see if I can develop a business out of this hobby.

 Posted by at 9:54 pm

Finally Finished Lecture One

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Nov 072011
 

Well I have finally managed to finish the assignments for the first lecture on the IHGS course.

I now have to wait for the assignments to be marked by the tutor to see how I have done.

The assignments were very different both in content and work done. The first, an autobiography took quite a while and I ended up doing in excess of 14,000 words. This meant that even when it was finished it took quite a wile to go through it to check it etc. It was quite a therapeutic exercise and it is very interesting to look back and realise how much I have actually done in my life. I think that from time to time I will come back to it and filling some of the things I am sure I have missed and keep it up to date.

The second assignment, explaining how you found out information about your direct ancestors was much shorter, coming in a little under 1,500 words. The difficult part was doing the Seize Quartiers drop-line pedigree, working out the best way of doing it and making sure I had included all the information I needed.

So it is on to Lecture two now – Family Records.

 Posted by at 11:19 pm

Getting Organised is the Hard Bit

 Family History, Leighton Family History  No Responses »
Oct 102011
 

I have been carrying on getting sorting out the research I have done and not put onto GEDitCOM. It is taking quite a bit of time, particularly with the censuses. Sometimes it does not take long to find the person you are looking for and download a copy of the relevant census but updating is a different matter. On some of the censuses I have not only had to update the person I was looking for but also created and update a number of other people.

I must learn from this and update my records after each bit of research before going onto something else.

Having almost done this I have found I have some details of all 16 great-great-grandparents when I thought I only had the information for 12, so that is good. I only have married names for a couple of the ladies so will need to do some more digging at some point.

 Posted by at 6:41 am

Need to get sorted

 IHGS Course, Leighton Family History  No Responses »
Oct 042011
 

I have made a start on the second assignment, which is good.

Part of this is to d a tree with you, your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and finally great-great-grandparents it you know them all. I thought that this should be relatively straight forward. I use GEDitCOM II as my main database. I think that this a a great package as is not too expensive and you can customise it be just as you want it. Further, the file structure is basically a GEDCOM file structure. The only downside, for some anyway, it that it is a Mac only product.

So there I was drying my tree and using the information from with in GEDitCOM. I started to thing that I more information than was coming out. I then realised that I have done quite a bit of research including obtaining certificated etc. and had not updated my database. Thus I am in the process of getting my database up to date with all my recent research before I complete this assignment.

At the same time I have committed myself to making sure all research is correctly processed before moving onto any more.

I had not updated for the certificated that showed my great-grandmother re-marrying following the death of my great-grandfather or the great find of pages from a family bible held in the East Yorkshire archives and the recent find of seaman’s records for my grandfather mentioned previously in this blog.

 Posted by at 7:35 pm

I Finally Got There

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Sep 262011
 

Yesterday I worked on my autobiography again, and finally got to the end, what a relief.

There is bout two final steps, to go through it a couple of time to pickup on any errors and add some picture/documents to break up the text a little.

I cannot explain how good this feels. I feel in part as though I have finally got started on the course and that I am now actually moving forward.

Assignment two should be a lot quicker. We shall have to see!!

 Posted by at 10:26 pm

Best Way to Draw a Chart?

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Sep 202011
 

Despite having not finished assignment one I have been thinking about assignment two quite a bit over the last few days. So today I thought I would make a start on the drop-line pedigree chart. This has to be done manually, i.e. not using genealogy software.

I thought I could do it in Word using a table, but this was not going well. So I turned to Excel and managed to set it up quite well, with the use of merged cells. The aim was to get the basic layout set up, but I got carried away and ended up completing the chart. I just meed to do the written part of the assignment now.

In future, my first port of call fro drawing charts will be Excel.

It feels as though I am starting to make some progress at last.

 Posted by at 10:17 pm

Autobiography – It Just Keeps Going

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Sep 192011
 

I managed to do more on my autobiography yesterday. As it was my wife’s birthday there was limited time for the IHGS course this Sunday.

However I did think that I might get through the last few years. I just did not realise how much has happened in the last few years, some quite significant. It just keeps going and going. I have done 12,500 words and there are still four years to go.

This next Sunday I must finish it, in therms of getting up to date, and then go back through it and tidy it up.

 Posted by at 10:39 pm

Autobiography – A Long Haul

 IHGS Course  No Responses »
Sep 102011
 

I managed to make progress with my first assignment, my autobiography, today. I was hoping to have more or less completed it today, but there is still some way to go. This is dispute the fact that I have done nearly 11,000 words.

There seems so much to say considering I did not think I had done much in my life. I do worry though that I am getting into too much detail that would not interest anyone other than me, not even my great-grandchildren. Am I being a little bit of a perfectionist in trying to get everything in.

On the other side, when people publish their autobiographies they are whole books of may thousands of words.

I must just press on and get to the end!

 Posted by at 11:28 pm
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