Connections.......?

To give myself a break from finding missing sources and other.....er...little problems, I've set myself another *small* task......

To find the link between my "family" Culpins, who started out in Woodnewton, in Northamptonshire, and those Culpins in Spalding in Lincolnshire.  Geographically, not far apart but who can tell.....????

More soon.

Trains and stuff.......

Well, what a fabulous day I had on Saturday!!

This was lunch with my "new" cousins, in Reading.  A simple journey, down to London, round to Paddington and then the train to Reading.  A good lunch with the cousins and my sister, laughs and discovering some surprising similarities.  Then home again, sister and I in opposite directions but still hit by the same mini-tornado which seemed to cross southern England late Saturday afternoon.  My train was stopped in driving rain and very strong winds, when the overhead power tripped out, and sister's train by the more prosaic "tree across the line".  Good ol' Mother Nature.  Didn't spoil the day, though, so that's fine.

Finding the new cousins was the result of ....well, sheer bloody-mindedness on my part really; which is what we all need as genealogists (although we dress it up as "persistence" to be polite!)  I'm still in "check, check, check" mode and am updating my database to my somewhat-more-exact standards; more exact, that is, than when I started this hobby/obsession about 20 years ago.  And, of course, the software is so much better and can record things in a much more useful way.

I'm lucky that one side of my family comes from my neck of the woods so I have access to local newspapers as well as the records office; therefore I have a number of funeral reports, and a couple of marriages too, which give some wonderful lists of names of the attendees.  All good stuff!

So, back to the checking.

More soon.

Sources and how to make a note of them........

So, here we are in the new year and I haven't written a post about my resolutions.  That's mainly because my resolution for 2014 was decided for me by an email from someone who'd seen one of my trees on Ancestry.    It showed me quite clearly the way forward.....

Which is to check, check and check again.  Back when I was a baby genealogist I didn't seem to bother with sources, being more interested in simply logging the information I was finding.  This is now coming back to bite me; apart from offending my reasonably tidy mind, it also caused much embarrassment when the aforementioned contact asked me where I'd found a set of christening dates.

The precision of them suggested that I'd got them from the parish register, rather than a compiled index..  The particular village is not on the IGI so I must've been to the Records Office for them.  But I didn't write it down so I have no idea.

So I'm off to Huntingdon again tomorrow in the hope of a seat in their archives searchroom so I can look again at the parish register and, this time, note that I have done!!

On the positive side, I'm looking to keep in touch with some new contacts I made last year and lunch has just been arranged with my sister & I and our "new" cousins.  Excellent.

Happy hunting in 2014.

More soon.