Saturday, September 27, 2008

England and Wales GRO to Church Marriage Cross Reference

GRO to Church Marriage Cross Reference: "©2008 BristolBMD design by Neil Dun & Nate Allen

These pages have been put together to enable people to determine the church a marriage took place at, using the GRO reference. Typically the reference will have been found on FREEBMD

See a table of districts for which index data has been gathered and made freely available on this site"

Friday, September 26, 2008

PAF Insight

PAF Insight - Essential tools for the PAF User

and
PAFInsight Mailing List - Google Search

Renee's Genealogy Blog: FamilyInsight in Open Beta:
Renee's Note: I found this posting on the PAFInsight Mailing List today.

FamilyInsight Beta version 2008.9.24 is now on the available at www.ohanasoftware.com
This is a BETA version so there are a few problems. Please save a copy of your file before you start to use the FamilyInsight Beta.

If you cannot sign in to new.familysearch.org you can still use the IGI Search mode in either FamilyInsight or PAF Insight.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

the problem of publishing geo-locations

Where 2.0, GPS, maps and genealogy - Google Search


from my email:-


Kerry Raymond wrote:
Part of the problem of publishing geo-locations (as Paul Blair and I have discussed quite a lot in the past) is in knowing (or guessing) what your users are likely to do with the data.

On our site for each cemetery, we provide the Lat/Long as raw numbers (both DMS and decimal degree formats) and we also provide links to that location in GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps (they are all generated from the same source data so they are always consistent). See here for an example of one of our cemeteries:

http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/Maroon_General_Cemetery-Boonah/

As I suspect (but really have no way of knowing) that the most common use people make of this information is via GoogleMaps and then with GE, I tend to favour publishing a geo-location that "looks right" in GM/GE and will tend to "nudge" my GPS waypoint a bit until it appears visually over the cemetery in GM/GE. However, as Paul says, if GM/GE's maps drift a bit, then of course what may start out as "looking right" may end up looking wrong. Sigh!

I suppose I could decouple the raw numbers from the links and treat them as 3 separate waypoints, one which is the true reading I got from the GPS and the other two being nudged to look right in the respective applications (obviously these would still have to be maintained to reflect the "drift" in underlying applications). However, unlike Paul, I have yet to get hate mail from my geo-locations (they whole point of our site being primarily to allow people to just look at the photos online rather than visit the cemetery) so it's not a big issue.

Another option is to configure your GPS receiver to display coordinates in the WGS84 datum. My 1996-vintage Garmin receiver has a very extensive set of datums built in, and I can select which one I want the displayed position to be referred to.

If I want to publish Google Earth compatible coordinates, I can tell my GPS receiver to use the WGS84 datum.

On the other hand, if I'm visiting a cemetery in Britain and I want to provide people with the grid reference on a U.K. Ordnance Survey map, I can tell my GPS receiver to use the Ordnance Survey datum and to display positions as British National Grid coordinates rather than latitude and longitude. There are still a few of us who would rather trust an O.S. map than a satnav system :-)

David Harper
Cambridge, England
Part of the problem of publishing geo-locations - Google Search

More:-

Discussions - soc.genealogy.computing | Google Groups: "re 2.0, GPS, maps and genealogy
Hey folks, I attended a big Web 2.0 expo here . . . . . . ."

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Bristol and Somerset Bunfight 2008

Bunfight 2008 near Pensford Somerset - misty morning on river Severn near Gloucester, river Usk at Newport, and the river Wye below Chepstow - a set on Flickr

DSC05649

The Carpenters Arms | Country Pub | Restaurant | Fine Ales | Carefully Selected Wines | Places to eat | Stanton Wick | Somerset: "Converted from a row of charming miners' cottages, the Inn has become a popular retreat over the years for those appreciating good food, fine wines, real ales and delightful en-suite accommodation."

DSC05823

Bristol BS39 4BX, UK to Chew Valley Lake, United Kingdom - Google Maps

afterwards BS39 4BX - Google Maps I walked an ancient right of way . . .
Streetmap.co.uk- Landranger map for 361574,162079 - whch shows the footpath nort west from Stanton Wick ending at the bus stop at Whitley Batts


DSC05886

BS39 4BX - the dead tree from above on Google Maps

Slideshow

P.C. Bartrum: Scholar of Welsh genealogy - Obituaries, News - The Independent

P.C. Bartrum: Scholar of Welsh genealogy - Obituaries, News - The Independent
©independent.co.uk

Although he had no family connection with Wales, and was in some respects the quintessential Englishman, P.C. Bartrum devoted his immense scholarly skills to the study of Welsh genealogy, in which he was the foremost expert.

Peter Clement Bartrum was born in Hampstead, London, in 1907 and educated at Clifton College and the Queen's College, Oxford. Most of his career was spent as a meteorologist in the Colonial Service in Bermuda and West Africa, but during his spare time he learned to read Welsh, the better to understand medieval manuscripts in which the descent of prominent families is set out. The authors of most of these important works were heraldic bards who were employed by noble families to research their histories. One such was Gutun Owain, who in 1491 traced the ancestry of Owain Tudur of Penmynydd in Anglesey, the grandfather of Henry VIII.

Bartrum was especially interested in the legends associated with Arthur – not the later fanciful accretions dreamt up by writers such as Malory and Tennyson but the much earlier Annales Cambriae and Historia Brittonum dating from around the 9th and 10th centuries, in which Arthur appears as a dux bellorum (tribal military head) who leads the native Britons against the invading Saxons. His interest also took in the tale of Culhwch and Olwen, found in the Mabinogion, which dates from around 1100 and is thus the earliest composition on an Arthurian theme in any language.

But his magnum opus was the 26-volume Welsh Genealogies AD 300-1400 and Welsh Genealogies AD 1400-1500, published by the University of Wales Press and the National Library of Wales in 1974 and 1983 respectively. It is these two works, together with Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (1966), which form the basis of the archive that Bartrum presented to the Welsh Department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2006. The work, which is now being put into an electronic database with the help of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will be, when completed in 2009, an important source for academic researchers, historians and literary historians engaged in the study of medieval society.

The archive, consisting of thousands of names, will make it possible to trace the lineage of eminent people, their period and region – which would have otherwise taken months of research – with minimal effort. Members of the public who can already trace their families to the 16th century will also be able to go much further back.

Bartrum, who was awarded an Honorary DLitt by the University of Wales in 1988, also compiled A Welsh Classical Dictionary: people in history and legend up to about AD 1000, which the National Library of Wales published in 1993. His passion was madrigal music – he sang in several groups – and his other interests included the theory of relativity, on which he delivered a paper to the Royal Society in 1965.

When asked to say why he was prepared to spend so many years in the meticulous labour of collecting and deciphering medieval manuscripts, Bartrum modestly explained that "he liked to put things in order". The triumph of his scholarship will soon be plain to see by a wider public, thanks to technology which did not exist for most of his long life.

Meic Stephens

Peter Clement Bartrum, meteorologist and genealogist: born London 4 December 1907; meteorologist in Colonial Service 1932-55; married Barbara Spurling (died 2003; one son); died Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire 14 August 2008.

©independent.co.uk