Investigating, Writing & Shooting!
Monday was mostly notable for getting rained on & hiding in the bookshop. So I didn't bother to write about it ;)
Yesterday I finally got round to ordering the certificate I found on Friday after I'd done the batch of ordering. And while I was at it I ordered some more Patterson birth certificates to try & get round our brickwall on that line. What we know (at the moment) is that J's great-great-grandfather William was the son of Thomas Patterson & Margaret Oxley, but we can't find a marriage for them. It's possible they didn't get married (or married after having children), but as that branch of the family seems to've been very good at marrying then having children (rather than vice versa or not at all) then it seems a bit odd for the one couple not to bother. We also can't find Margaret Oxley on the 1841 or 1851 censuses (ie pre "marriage"). The only place we have the Oxley surname from is William's birth certificate - so just in case that's wrong I've ordered some of the other children's certificates, one for William's only older sibling (Thomason) and one for Edward, the youngest. I got two because Margaret's age varies wildly between censuses, with 1861 in particular being different from later ones, so it's possible that Thomas married two different Margarets. If they all come back "Oxley" then I think we'll be stuck there.
I also went on with writing up the Gibsons & the Robinsons. I've got first draft done of the meat of the information, the only bit with no words at all now is the last "What Next?" section. It definitely needs polishing though, the only things I've written lately have been journal entries - and they stay pretty much stream of conciousness. I tweak them a bit, sometimes, but rarely more than correcting spelling or disentangling some particularly infelicitous phrasing (things that would make perfect sense spoken aloud, but you need the tone of voice to make sense of, usually). But with this there's the danger of it turning into a list of names & births & occupations ... and the point of writing it up at all is to get away from that into something with a bit more readability. I also still need to do the maps, and do the actual data lists but I think Gramps will do the latter for me. I just need to actually, y'know, look at the report options & so on.
And on a totally different note, I then had an evening full of L4D - we're definitely getting a lot better, get to the finale on No Mercy fairly often now. Just me & alt started out, then bny & hilander joined us, with ffb replacing bny later on. I had to bail out coz it was bedtime just before they were successful - alt made it out onto the helicopter! So he's done that for real (unlike me ;) )!
Yesterday I finally got round to ordering the certificate I found on Friday after I'd done the batch of ordering. And while I was at it I ordered some more Patterson birth certificates to try & get round our brickwall on that line. What we know (at the moment) is that J's great-great-grandfather William was the son of Thomas Patterson & Margaret Oxley, but we can't find a marriage for them. It's possible they didn't get married (or married after having children), but as that branch of the family seems to've been very good at marrying then having children (rather than vice versa or not at all) then it seems a bit odd for the one couple not to bother. We also can't find Margaret Oxley on the 1841 or 1851 censuses (ie pre "marriage"). The only place we have the Oxley surname from is William's birth certificate - so just in case that's wrong I've ordered some of the other children's certificates, one for William's only older sibling (Thomason) and one for Edward, the youngest. I got two because Margaret's age varies wildly between censuses, with 1861 in particular being different from later ones, so it's possible that Thomas married two different Margarets. If they all come back "Oxley" then I think we'll be stuck there.
I also went on with writing up the Gibsons & the Robinsons. I've got first draft done of the meat of the information, the only bit with no words at all now is the last "What Next?" section. It definitely needs polishing though, the only things I've written lately have been journal entries - and they stay pretty much stream of conciousness. I tweak them a bit, sometimes, but rarely more than correcting spelling or disentangling some particularly infelicitous phrasing (things that would make perfect sense spoken aloud, but you need the tone of voice to make sense of, usually). But with this there's the danger of it turning into a list of names & births & occupations ... and the point of writing it up at all is to get away from that into something with a bit more readability. I also still need to do the maps, and do the actual data lists but I think Gramps will do the latter for me. I just need to actually, y'know, look at the report options & so on.
And on a totally different note, I then had an evening full of L4D - we're definitely getting a lot better, get to the finale on No Mercy fairly often now. Just me & alt started out, then bny & hilander joined us, with ffb replacing bny later on. I had to bail out coz it was bedtime just before they were successful - alt made it out onto the helicopter! So he's done that for real (unlike me ;) )!