Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2017
News! I’m doing a talk at Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2017 at the NEC in Birmingham. In “Turn your family tree surprises into a book”, I...
Category: Sources
Knock down family tree brick walls with the 1939 Register
Check out Find My Past for my guest blog about family tree brick walls I demolished with The 1939 Register. Without it, I would’ve struggled to trace Uncl...
Review: Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2015
I’d never been to WDYTYA? Live before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Everyone speaks about it in excitable tones, and now that it’s...
FreeREG’s new look
After a great deal of work, the new interface for FreeREG is now online: FreeREG2. It sits over a database that contains 20,000,000 parish register transcriptio...
1934 hotel adverts from the ABC railway guide
In researching my novel, which is set in the mid-1930s, I needed to do some research into train journey times. As any good Agatha Christie fan will know, the AB...
How to date a photograph… perhaps
I’m very lucky that so many photos of my relatives have survived. The above is one of my favourites – a family group – and I have been trying ...
The Taylor family album
In July, I went to Somerset to visit my dad, and we ended up in the Smuggler’s Cave in Watchet. There’s all sorts of treasures to be found here R...
Parish registers in Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White”
*contains spoilers* If you’ve ever read The Woman in White, then you’ll know that all the mystery and obfuscation, the swapping of people drugged on...
Lawshall: of private baptisms and misgotten infants
Hogarth’s depiction of Tristram Shandy’s home baptism. The other week, I started to transcribe the parish registers for Lawshall in Suffolk, startin...