In late 2006, inspired by the wife’s purchase of a Martha Stewart genealogy fan chart, I started tracing my family tree.  Mostly this has been done using online sources such as Ancestry and Scotland’s People, but I’ve also used various primary source documents and have been fortunate to find other folk’s research for some lines on the web.

You can see the results of my research here.  All my blog entries on the topic are here.

If you have any questions, or of course if you can be of any help in providing me with new leads or information, I’d love to hear from you!

My photos are now available for your viewing delight on Flickr. Here’s a taster of what you can expect:

I just noticed the strangest thing.  When we moved into our new house in August, it was raining, and it quickly became apparent that we had a slight problem with our guttering, as the rain poured through a large crack between two pieces and noisily landed on the driveway.

I put this to the back of my mind – it wasn’t a big issue and I had plenty of other jobs that needed doing.  I figured that soon enough, the noise would drive me to action during the winter months as the rain became more frequent.  But then this weekend, I realised that the noise has stopped occurring during showers.  I went out to take a look, and sure enough, the gap has disappeared – I can only think that some kind soul (possibly our window-cleaner?) has taken it upon his or her self to spontaneously fix our guttering for me.

So, if you’re the anonymous North Yorkshire gutter-fixer, thank you very much!

A reader’s letter in this week’s Computer Weekly (UK trade magazine) includes the following paragraph:

How ironic then that someone with so much experience in the IT industry apparently doesn’t appreciate the difference between the Internet (which dates back to the 1960s) and the World Wide Web!  The Internet is a collection of networks, whereas the Web is a collection of hyperlinked documents and other resources.  The Web is accessible via the Internet, as are other services including FTP, e-mail, P2P file sharing, etcetera.

…and that is definitely the last time I will ever explain that, OK? 

I note with interest that of the visits to my site from Windows users in the last seven days, a fifth are running Vista (and no, none of them are me!  I exclude my IP address from my Google Analytics stats, and anyway, I’m still not back on Vista after abandoning it in June).

That seems a mighty high proportion to be running an OS that hasn’t yet been officially released.  Does this mean my readership are living on the (bleeding) edge, or could it reflect the fact that many of them found my site when Googling for information about getting Daemon Tools running on Vista?  Hmmm…

Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing!  So it should be available for download from MSDN in about a week – can’t wait!  Both my work and home machines have been awfully crufty in recent months, but I’ve been putting off the inevitable repave until this milestone release.

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Oriented vs. Orientated

Specialty vs. Speciality

See, it’s not all pavement / sidewalk and tap / faucet, y’know.  In fact, the more similar the two words, the more vocal the arguments!

Office 2007 has been released to manufacturing!  Having used the beta versions for the last six months, I have to say that this is a great product, and the most revolutionary Office upgrade that I’ve ever known. 

If you’ve been using previous versions of Office for a long time, then you may initially experience the “where’s that feature gone?” feeling quite often at first, but stick with it and I think you’ll grow to love the Ribbon interface.  I certainly wouldn’t go back to Office 2003.  Or Office XP.  Or Office 2000.  Or Office 97.  Or Office 95.  Or Office 6…  or….

How fascinating – having blogged about all the ins and outs of developing their second web-app, Amigo, Carson Systems have announced their intention to sell their first app, DropSend.  True to form, they’re blogging about as much of the experience as possible.

Late last night I reached a small but significant milestone in my family tree research:  I now know the names of my sixteen great-great-grandparents!  Or so I believe – I just need to wait for a couple of certificates to arrive from the GRO to prove my theories.

So, who do I think I am?  Well, at this stage it appears that my blood is:

• 50.0% English
• 37.5% Scottish
• 12.5% Irish

Those sixteen ancestors were born between 1829 and 1860.

I haven’t yet updated my online family tree, but will do so later today.

I suspect that this marks the end of the "easy bit" of my research, and doubt that I’ll ever succeed in discovering the names of all of my 32 great-great-great-grandparents.  Still, you never know…