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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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!