Not to mention...... Purely Pates

My Pates' come from Biggleswade in Bedfordshire but, given the way my mind jumps about, you won't be surprised to hear that I want to find more of them.

I've seen a number of them in Luton, practically just down the road so that's where my digits have been walking for the last week or so.  In this endeavour I'm using the "shooting fish in a barrel" approach of building the tree on Ancestry and, accordingly, finding quite a few.

The main problem I have with this is that I don't really take in the information; mostly when I search for family I transcribe the info into one of many notebooks and thus, for some reason, the details will mostly stay in my brain for a while.  I'm trying to help myself by scribbling out rough "trees"...!

Plus, unusually for me, I'm really only taking notice of the male of the species.  I justify this because I'm doing a quick'n'dirty version really of a one-name study, to see if I can link the Pates name from Biggleswade to Luton.  If I can then I will go back and fill the dates in properly; if not, then I will file the info away for another time.

More soon.

.....and Completely Culpin

After spending what feels like months on my Stadens, I have been able to connect a few families but only within the file itself and sadly not into my main file. But hey ho, I’m sure it will happen soon…

So I turn my attention now to the Culpins who remain in my ‘Strays’ file; and on the first person, Adelaide Culpin, I managed to link her and her small family to the main file straight away!

Result!

Onwards, while the feeling of success lasts....

More soon.

Strictly Staden

My current genealogy task is to sort out my “Strictly Staden“ file. This contains all the Staden names which I have gathered over the years but whose owners don’t belong in my main family file. Yet.

So far I have sorted into the Southampton branch and the Dorset/Devon branch; I'm now working on the first Derbyshire branch because there are an awful lot of them around near Hartington and the like.

I’m now halfway through “Derbyshire1“ and luckily it’s one family. Goodness only knows what’s going to happen with the rest!

More soon.

RANDOMNESS

Nothing really about genealogy in this post except, perhaps, a small touch of Norwegian Royal Family history.......

I've been watching a film on the BBC iPlayer called "The King's Choice" about King Haakon of Norway and what happened when the Nazis invaded in 1940.  They were not, of course, the only family affected and, indeed, their royal cousins around Europe undoubtedly had similar problems; but I'd never really thought about it before.  For the record, I am no ardent Royalist.

I've read about how the various Royal families escaped to the UK or the USA as the Nazis made their way across Europe but it was always reported in a single sentence.  This film showed the process  involved and the decisions which had to be made.  It's a responsibility most fortunately denied to me but it was a most moving and tense film.

More soon.

Mind the gap?

One of my friends has just politely reminded me of the large gap since I last posted on here, so here I am, somewhat embarrassed, and wondering what to ramble on about today.

During the last few months I’ve been working on a number of different trees on the website and I’m currently engaged in the Langford branch which has had to be completely rewritten for the last 200 years (by which I mean 200 years going backwards). The 1700s and 1600s being quite wrong, my cousin and I discovered, so he did the legwork and I checked some of it and now we have both redirected that part of our shared tree. So having had to take out a number of downward branches I’m now re-entering some of them and finding out all sorts of new things!

But who knows? I may well get distracted and go back to the Culpins which are always at the back of my mind and certainly having had coffee this morning wth a friend and fellow Culpin researcher I am already thinking I wonder what to do next with them.

Onwards then and I will do my best to be back son!

While I’m waiting for an appointment for which I am horrendously early (I forgot that there’s far less traffic during school holidays) ......

When I transferred my data into my current website (uses TNG - try it, it’s brilliant) I became aware that my method of recording census information wasn’t going to work so I have been slowly working through all 17k people to change it. It may take a while longer yet but even I weary of going to the ‘Places’ page and seeing the most popular please listed as ‘age 1, scholar’!

So if you should find yourself on www.culpinconnection.co uk, please ignore the rather random places you may find.... ;-)

More soon.

Mind the gap again.....

Is it too late to do the "Happy New Year" thing? 

I seem to have been absent a while.  But, hey, let's carry on with some random ramblings while I wait to see why "Tow away" signs and "No Parking" cones have been liberally scattered around the close.

I'm back to checking what I've done before and still find the odd mistake.  Thanks to the GRO online index of births including the mother's maiden name I have been able to find a few missing children: I like to match up the number of offspring with the info given on the 1911 census.

Yesterday's discovery included two new "Staden descendants" children and my favourite 1911 occuupation of the year so far:- "cinema ice cream salesman".  How good is that?  And, even better, it was a man.

Onwards....