Great War Centenary: William Culpin

William (Willie) Culpin was born in Elton, Hunts, in August 1884, the eldest of the thirteen children of William and Lizzie, nee Quince.

The family moved to Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire, before 1890 and William grew up in the village before he went from being a horseman on a farm to a soldier.  In the 1911 census he was 26 years old and serving in the 1st Northants regiment.

I know little else about him.  He died on 20 March 1916 in France, in the Pas-de-Calais region, and was buried in the Maroc British Cemetery, Grenay.

We will remember them.

Patience is everything....

I have a subscription to FindMyPast so most of the things to do involve the 1939 Register.   

More soon. 

That'll teach me......

Soooo, I have a new website (culpinconnection.co.uk) which uses The Next Generation software.  And very good it is too.  It also means that the majority of my genealogy data is in the cloud, at last.

However I'm trying to be too clever, I think.

Firstly I tried to import some people from one tree into another..... And totally forgot that the imported people might have the same ID number as those in the other database.  And what a complete mess that made.  So I had to delete the database and re-import an older version.

Said older version, however, doesn't seem to contain any entries for the 1881 census.

Which is a bit of a shame (I'm understating slightly).

So I have another choice:  be clever and attempt to import (from Gedcom) just the 1881 entries, or simply enter them by hand (all 1800 of them).  I think the latter, whilst time-consuming, might be the safer option....

More soon.

Great War Centenary: Alfred Ernest Glew

Alfred Ernest Glew was born in Farnborough in 1896, youngest of the five children of Richard and Matilda (nee Culpin).  He was christened at St Mark's church in the town on 6 December that year.  My fifth cousin three times removed, he appears to stay in Farnborough and is described as a telegraph boy in the 1911 census. 

Sadly he was the second son in the family to die in the Great War - his brother Joseph died on 16 June 1915 and you will find his blog entry in the archives.

Alfred served with the 1st (Queen Mary's Own) Hussars and died on 6 January 1916; he is buried in the Bethune Town cemetery.

We will remember them.

So, it worked......

........ possibly.  Last week I received a discount voucher for one page of the 1939 Register.  Maybe because I complained to them so vehemently about the cost (it was certainly one of the most blunt emails I've ever written).  Or maybe not.

But I decided to use it anyway.  And, after a fair amount of thought to decide who would give me the best return, I settled on my paternal grandfather and his (new) family.  Despite a number of searches for the lady by her name, I was only finally able to find her by narrowing the search to her year of birth.

Only to find her listed with her full name.  With their daughters.  But not my grandfather!  

And, when I looked at the original entry, there was a note "See Page 12".  Not knowing what page I was on nor, indeed,  how to find another page I surmised that a lot more money was involved and I decided not to pursue it further.

NB.  Trying to apply my discount was a nightmare and took about 15 minutes "online chat" to get it all sorted out.

Overall I think I can safely say that I am considerably underwhelmed by the publication of the 1939 Register.  Perhaps when the owners decide to stop putting barriers in our way.....

More soon.

1939 and all that.....

A couple of weeks ago the 1939 Register was published and the genealogy world let go of its collectively-held breath. 

And, in my case, let out a heartfelt howl of protest.   I have a subscription to the site which has it, which I renewed just for this moment.  The index is free for anyone to search. But I discovered that to look at ONE original page the cost would be £6.95...... Oh, or you can buy four pages for about £20.

So I decided that, unless I win the lottery, I would make do with the index. I discovered that I could use the reference number for each entry to find out who else was on the page. And I was able to find the street name sometimes. Not always, because searching for villages is a nightmare. 

And then the site admins must have found out about the reference number "loophole". And now they've removed it. 

Is the site run by the Government?  It certainly seems to be putting things out of the reach of those of us without a massive bank balance. 

Rant over. 

More soon. 

Progress perhaps.....?

Finally I have realised that life is too short to mess around with things which don't want to load so I've created a new domain where I will host my website.

In the meantime the original site at www.praeteritus.co.uk is up and running again while I wait for the new site to set up.

More soon.