Wanted: Naked Genealogists

I thought that would get your attention, but first let me make this clear from the start this is purely hypothetical, I am not asking for photos of naked genealogists, honest.

Last night I happened to see part of How To Look Good Naked on Channel 4, the presenter Gok Wan was trying to get people to join his Naked Army and have a photo taken of their group of friends or colleagues naked, in the style of The Calendar Girls. So basically people doing everyday things or taking part in their hobbies, with carefully placed items covering any private bits. There are a few examples on the How To Look Good Naked website. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what size or shape you are, or even what sex you are, just so long as you are prepared to show you are not ashamed of your body as it is.

This got me thinking, what if it was a calendar of genealogists? or geneabloggers?

Would you be prepared to do it? If so, how would you like to be photographed? Where would you be (provided you could get permission), what would you be doing? and what props would you use? Don’t worry I am not going to ask you to prove it (I have far too much to do already to organise a photo shoot and publish a calendar).

For my own part I know my body is not perfect, but I think it would be such fun to take part. I can see myself in a record office leaning over a large table, examining the detail of an early map with a magnifying glass.

Come on don’t be shy, let us know whether you would be brave enough to bare all!

A visit to the seaside on my day off (or rather a visit to a library near the seaside)

One of these days I am going to take a day off work and not get up the same time as I would if I was going to work. Still it gave me the opportunity to confuse the bus driver by going in the opposite direction to the way I would normally be going.

I know I was supposed to be heading to the East Sussex Record Office at Lewes, East Sussex, but I needed to do a couple of look ups in Worthing as well. So instead of jumping on a bus heading east out of Brighton, I jumped on one headed west.

Worthing Pier in the sunshine

Worthing Library was featured in the latest series of Who Do You Think You Are? and for good reason. In my opinion it has the best local studies collection of any of the West Sussex libraries and today it was more convenient (cheaper and quicker) for me than visiting the West Sussex Record Office at Chichester.

Not only did I find the two entries in the parish registers I was after, but I also came away with a copy of Wills and Other Probate Records by Karen Grannum and Nigel Taylor. This book published by The National Archives in 2004 had been withdrawn for sale for some reason (perhaps it has been republished since) and cost me just £2, a real bargain and something to read on the bus heading back to Brighton and Lewes.

Running out of time again, I blame the Bible

This seems to be a familiar story, tomorrow I am heading for Lewes to do some research, but I am not really prepared.

It really is the same old story. I should be looking up references, but I got distracted. Last night sorting through some paperwork I came across a couple of printouts of images taken from what I call “The Trower Family Bible”. It is probably not really a Bible, it is probably actually a Prayer Book or something like that.

So, last night I did a bit of research and began to make sense of some of the names written in the book and started to be able to piece together the story of how the book ended up with my father.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t really looked in any detail at this book for a long time, in fact right back when I was first starting out researching our family.

All through the day I have been thinking about this book and starting to appreciate its importance. So this evening I just had to go and visit my parents and examine it more closely and also get some digital photos of the important pages.

It was even more interesting than I had remembered, there was another page with a few lines of writing (sadly mostly unreadable) that I hadn’t noticed before and even the contents of the book were quite intriguing with details on the different types of religious services.

So I now have another project, to research and tell the history of this book. There aren’t many heirlooms in our family, but this is probably the most important one, and in the future I will explain why it is such a key piece of evidence in my family history.

For now I will leave you with an image of one of the pages about two-thirds of the way through, with an important piece of dating evidence at the bottom of the page, the date MDCCXXXIX or 1739, making this book 270 years old.

The 270 year old New Testament

When filing goes bad…

And I thought I had a problem with my folders

And before you ask that is not my filing system, this is the folder graveyard where I work.

Anyone else like to come up with a better caption? Sorry there are no prizes, just leave your suggestion in the comments.

Weekly Genealogy Preview (for week 40)

I ended up doing more research than organising last week, I did make quite a dent in my stuff to sort folder and also added some more 4x great grandparents to my tree. There are a couple of key things to do this week, but most of it is the same old stuff which didn’t get done last week.

• There is a very good chance that I will be going to the East Sussex Record Office this week, and although I have a rough research plan, I need to get some specific references organised.
• Continue working through my stuff to sort folder, making sure I have all the data on my PC and then throw away the paper copy. It would be nice to finish this week as this task is start to drag on, but I think there is still too much work to be done.
• I didn’t get my blogroll updated last week, I really must do it this week.
• I don’t think there is much more I can do to identify any more of my 4x great grandparents without a visit to a couple of archives, so I need to look at putting together a plan for tracing those missing ancestors in October.