• Anne-Julie passed on lots of tips, including the suggestion that I make an appointment for a massage or a facial. Such “extravagances” struck me as way too indulgent, but I’m seriously wondering whether this is something I should rethink. I do feel the benefit of taking the time to give myself a leisurely facial at home, but I wonder how much more relaxing and rewarding it could be (not to mention better results, perhaps) to have someone else do it all.
• Something else she said struck an immediate chord: “Not having to listen to anyone but the voice in your head can be very relaxing”. When I’m under stress I can get inordinately irritated by someone having the TV on (even quietly) in another room, and so I do very much appreciate the chance of silence. Even soothing music can be too much at times, so I really did try to make the most of some silent times when I could, and I felt the stress easing immediately. How lucky I am to have access to silence!
• Sharon also gave me lots of advice, one great piece being “sipping hot chocolate as slowly as possible (shot of mead or other enhancement optional)”. I tried this (the unenhanced variety was good enough) and it was really very good indeed. I don’t drink hot chocolate very often so it’s a treat in any case, and really savouring it down to the last drop was a wonderfully calming experience. I’ve been doing the same with tea, too, choosing a really aromatic sort where the perfume lingers in the room.
• James passed on the tip that “setting aside some time at the beginning of weekend-days to do some of the small discrete tasks lets me enjoy the rest of the day”. This most definitely works for me, and I have grown to love the routine of going out and getting the weekend shopping done before breakfast on a Saturday – that way the shops and market are less crowded, and I invariably come home with some goodie or other for the breakfast table to boot.
• Keith said “I find the sound of sea birds and the tides to be quite relaxing”, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s something I miss when I’m in land-locked Southern Germany, but a river or a lake is quite a good partial substitute, or even just watching and listening to the water flowing along the Bächle (water channels) in Freiburg’s streets. At some point when the weather was mild a few days ago I opened the french windows and just enjoyed that sound floating up from the street – it must have been Sunday as the street was blissfully quiet otherwise.
• Niamh’s suggestions included  “a bath with lots of bubbles in the dark, candles and a eye mask”. I’m not much of a bath person (I’m too impatient and much prefer showers under almost any circumstances), but I did bring out various candles to put in the living room, which in combination with softer artificial lighting had a wonderful effect, as well as providing that special intense but delicate warmth that the dullness of central heating can’t match.
• Claire reminded me of a tip I’d forgotten about, that “orange garments have the power to lift your mood”. I’m a big fan of orange and luckily it’s a colour that seems to suit me, so this seemed like a grand opportunity to do a wardrobe check. Unfortunately the only orange thing I could find that was seasonably suitable was a scarf, but hey – it was a lovely soft angora scarf and so the feel was as comforting as the colour was cheery. And I’ve promised myself I’ll keep an eye out for a lovely dark orange dress or tunic top the next time I go shopping.

So, thanks again to my lovely friends for all the wonderful suggestions – every one was appreciated and as you can see, each had its own appeal and benefit.

Therefore I have decided I MUST take some positive action this weekend. This evening’s likely to be a bit stressful (have to go out, on the bike, in the dark, in this weather, etc.) but I have to remember that I’m spending it with good friends, and that when I arrive home, other good friends will be here to spend the night, if not the weekend. I certainly need to see the benefits of this, and not the stress factors.

Apart from that, I am determined to have some times I can just switch off this weekend, be me, do “me” things, celebrate being me and all the rest. It’s all to easy to forget “me” sometimes, and that’s another sure sign that I’m stressed.

What are your sure-fire ways of combating stress in a realistic way when you’re busy and can’t spend oodles of time or money on it? I’ll be happy to try out a selection of your suggestions and will report back on them next week, hopefully adding them to my repertoire if I find they work well.

Of the many memes available out there – most of which I choose to avoid – the “Friday filler” or “Friday fill-in” seems one of the more enduring ones. You get given a series of statements, with blanks, and the text in bold is what you have filled in. I found this week’s Friday Fill-In here.

1. When I looked out the window this morning it struck me just how dirty it was, as the sun was shining on it at a rather unflattering angle (I was very pleased to see the sun, though!).

2. A bacon sandwich without HP sauce doesn’t make sense to me.

3. Remind me to put the Christmas tree out for collection on Monday morning. We are going to perform the death-defying feat of dropping it out of the french windows (on the 3rd floor, though with one of us down on the street to alert any would-be passers-by) to avoid spreading needles through the whole house.

4. Making yummy meals out of leftovers is something I love to do!

5. TP is text-speak for a type of Native American tent(?) – really I have no idea!*

6. I cleaned the refrigerator recently and I found a block of gouda (still unopened and fresh), and some broccoli from before Christmas (not so fresh).

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to beers with crazy Americans, tomorrow my plans include cycling up the hill to my friend’s house for dinner and Sunday, I want to chill, get some work done and deal with the tree.

* I’m intrigued: what would YOU fill in for this item?

Back then, most genealogists in the UK would have had to put in considerable mileage travelling from one county record office to the next, as a great many standard record types important to family history were housed in these regional repositories, and after all, very few of us can claim ALL of our ancestors to have been from within the same county.  There were some alternatives to all this travelling, though these did not necessarily cost any less: one could in some cases engage a local researcher or record office staff to undertake searches, copying etc. on one’s behalf, or for certain specific sets of records there might be CDs or microfiche indexes available for purchase from a family history society. In addition, quite a lot of online mailing lists and usergroups for genealogy did exist back in the early Noughties, and the more lively ones were a great way to source local knowledge or ask someone to look something up efficiently and relatively quickly. Software for compiling and storing your tree was also available but had a rather introspective, card-index-like feel to it, on the whole.

I was really lucky back then that my parents had the National Library of Wales practically on their doorstep, (a) because an awful lot of my ancestors were Welsh and (b) since that institution held (and still holds) most of the census, parish, probate and civil registration records for the whole of Wales (and the whole of the UK, in the case of the censuses and civil registration). I could esconce myself in there for days on end, oscillating between the card indexes, reference shelves, microfiche / microfilm readers and the manuscript room, with only the teensiest of coffee and lunch breaks as I Was Busy.

Although there were always helpful staff on hand to help, you really did need to have some specific knowledge of what kind of thing you were looking for, and where, especially if you were interested in e.g. wills or parish records, which are stored in small batches according to name, parish and/or date. A memory of a relative mentioning a particular village as an ancestor’s birthplace, or a detail previously discovered in another source, could prompt you to order the box of parish records for that area from around that date – the ordering and the waiting for your order to arrive was an art in itself – and in my case I generally made sure I went through said box in detail, looking for any mentions of the family or families in question. You could strike gold and go home with a notebook full of a few generations of new family members, or you could draw a blank and have to go back to square one for the next onslaught. Additional frustrations might be posed by problems of actually reading the damn things due to challenges such as poor or unfamiliar handwriting (here I was hugely advantaged by my training in paleography but still hit a brick wall at times), faded ink, mouse-nibbled, water-, mould- or fire-damaged paper/parchment and a whole array of other inconveniences. Sometimes it was a relief to return to the microfilm reader…

Nowadays people researching their UK ancestors can access the fully searchable 1841-1911 censuses online (mostly by paid subscription), as well as large banks of digitized and/or transcribed parish records, civil registration indexes, wills, military and criminal records, to name just a selection of kinds of records available. With the kind of “global” search options that are often available, you can type in a name and find a distant relative in a corner of the country – or indeed a different country – that you hadn’t thought of looking in.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain the ways in which all this can make searching for ancestors quicker, more convenient, in certain senses easier and rather more likely to pick up some random far-flung offshoots of a family. But in looking back at my old handwritten notes, photocopies and typed up lists of data gleaned from library visits of yore, I realized that what is undoubtedly technical progress doesn’t always equate to a greater success rate or improved methodology for the genealogist.

Back then, I carefully noted down everything I found that I thought was relevant. By hand, initially, at the library, together with the precise details and order slip for the batch of documents consulted, and later typed up at home. And I still have all that today. With online searches, though, it can so easily occur that you modify your search terms so many times that you have lost track of what you’ve actually looked for where. Or you close a tab by accident, or your search times out, and then you might as well start again in some cases, if the design of the search function is poor. But finger-pointing aside, being overwhelmed with data can simply make you lazy about recording it efficiently, and I have to confess that the thoroughness of my own methodology has not always kept up with the pace of “technical progress”.

Another important point is lateral thinking. I have written in a previous post about why this is indispensible in genealogical research, but its particular relevance here is that the human brain is – at least at the time of writing – simply more adaptable than the most sophisticated of search engines. If you encounter a funny spelling of a name in a manuscript source but are nevertheless at least semi-convinced that it is a name you are looking for, then you note it down. Some of the genealogy websites have tried to take this into account by allowing soundex or metaphone searches, for example, but I have found that even the best of these can deal only with fairly “standard” variants on a known name or similar names, but not with the weirder attempts that can arise from unfamiliarity, semi-literacy or problems in interpreting a regional pronunciation or foreign name. To give just one example, some of my ancestors had the family name Everson. Not a hugely problematic name for an English speaker, you might think, and yet I have come across spellings ranging through Evarson, Evanson, Evison, Eveson, Evenson, Evason, Evinson, Eberson, Heberson, Iverson, Iveson, Ibyson – I’m probably forgetting a few – for members of my family, and even the best-adapted of search functions will only pick up a fraction of these, while there are still plenty of sites where you will only get hits that are 100% identical to what you have typed in as your search term.

And this leads on to a related point: other people’s transcriptions. For (most of) the censuses available on the FindMyPast or Ancestry sites, for example, the digitized images of the original census return books are available, but in general you need to enter search terms in order to turn up hits that might then lead you to look at the original images. And the problem here is that all of the personal and placenames have been transcribed and fed into the index / search engine, but in addition to the points of “natural” variability outlined above, there seem to be quite frequently errors in the transcriptions. Which once again means that you can’t find the people you’re looking for. The fact that a standard transcription of a given (and known) placename is also often lacking does not make it any easier in some cases to narrow down your search geographically. You simply can’t find Llantrisant (normal spelling) on some of the censuses, as they have consistently transcribed the place name as “Llan Trisant”, “Llantrisaint” etc. Or someone has misinterpreted a county name abbreviation and your Monmouthshire-born ancestor will only appear if you type in Montgomery as their county of birth. This necessitates a great deal of lateral thinking as a result of someone else’s carelessness or lack of local knowledge. Sites that have used non-moderated OCR for the purposes of indexing / making searchable content of e.g. newspaper articles produce similarly problematic results, albeit for different reasons.

One’s own laziness or haste can also become a problem when it comes to the online census records in particular: the transcriptions are (except for problems just mentioned) so beautifully legible and cut-and-pasteable that I’m sure some inexperienced researchers might dispense with looking at the actual census images altogether. But even if you think “Bingo! I’ve found the family I was looking for and all the information is there”, you’re missing so much if you don’t look at them in their neighbourhood context. SO many families in the nineteenth century lived close to relatives and/or other families with a similar (or, equally telling, vastly different) social status, and there is much to be learned from this, just as you learn so much more about life in an individual parish from trawling through the hatches, matches and dispatches over a course of years, than if you clinically cherry-pick all of the interesting names in an online search.

Having said all of this, there is no way I am going to turn my back on online genealogy research with its rollercoaster of instant revelations just sometimes being tempered by clanging orthographical frustration or the results of someone else’s inconsistency. Like hundreds of thousands of people around the world with this interest, I am tremendously grateful for all the effort, time and dedication that has been put into providing databases, transcriptions and the like, a LOT of this provided by volunteers who do it for the love of it and because they know what it’s worth to others. But for all the ease of access and wealth of data available, validation and documentation of sources has never been more important, particularly with the growth of social media applications enabling amateur genealogists to share their own data with the world.

Today I saw this announcement by fellow Freiburg blogger Jochen that he was starting an “Iron Blogger” challenge for local bloggers (see his blog entry for how it works). He’d mentioned it a week or two ago on Twitter and I’d already decided that it might be the right thing for me, as a weekly entry on a subject of my choice seems a much more doable project at present than something daily or restricted to a topic or medium I might not always feel very enthusiastic about (e.g. photography or memes).

I know it’ll be a challenge for me all the same, but I’m going to try to get away from the feeling of obligation to write lengthy, complicated and/or erudite stuff, and I hope that this will in fact enable me to say more about a wider range of things that interest me (and, I hope, you).

I’m also optimistic that it’ll bring a few other Freiburg bloggers out of the woodwork – I can think of several who’ve let their blogs lie fallow of late, and several more who I’d love to see taking this up as a new challenge.

So: watch this space, and I’ll be back again very soon…

As most people probably know by now, one of my big interests is genealogy. It’s something I’ve always been interested in, and I’ve been actively researching my own family tree for over ten years now. Why? I love history in context, and understanding my family’s role in history – infinitessimally small though it may be in global terms – helps me to understand where I have come from and how families can develop and change over time parallel to – or against the tide of – the events we read about in history books.

The early years brought the opening up of huge vistas of data, but the more one collects and the larger the tree becomes, with its branches reaching further and further back in time, the more this rush of new discovery slows to a trickle, a drip, or in the case of some branches, a tip that has simply stopped growing. Genealogists calling this hitting a brick wall: you can’t research any further back (or sideways) as there simply isn’t any further data available at present, or the data available is too vague, or even because there is too much data and you can’t see the wood for the trees (e.g. because the person you are looking for has a very common name shared with numerous individuals).

In the case of my ancestor Mary Grice nee Harrison, elements of all three problems were at play. She appears on the 1841 census in Monmouthshire (you can see her listed with her husband Jacob, one son and (probably) a lodger on the right of the image), but the census tells us she was born somewhere outside the county in about 1766 (the 1841 census tends to round adult ages down to the closest 5 years, and in many cases older people in particular couldn’t remember exactly how old they were). I guesstimated that she might be from near Hartlebury in Worcestershire, as that is where she married and where her and Jacob’s children were born, including my great great great grandmother Ann Harrison Grice.

Given her common name, vague age and my lack of certainty about her birthplace, tracking down her parents was not going to be a very exact science. I abandoned Mary for a while and made more progress on the Grice family in the meantime.

When you hit a brick wall of this sort, you obviously can’t move forward but you can sometimes turn your attention sideways. And that, quite literally, is what I did in this case. If you look on the left hand side of the image, there are numerous members of a Harrison family, with a Richard Harrison born about 1791, outside Monmouthshire, at the top. With all these names to look up, the chances of finding data that correlated were much higher, and to cut a long story short, Richard and family were indeed from Hartlebury. Despite the common surname, the chances were rising significantly that he was related to Mary.

Richard’s parents were John Harrison (1772-1830) and Hannah Lambirth. I so wanted John to be Mary’s brother, but you learn fairly quickly in this game that simply wanting something to be true is definitely the worst possible substitute for hard data. In any case, I couldn’t find tallying birth or baptism records anywhere. What I did discover, however, is that another son of John and Hannah’s, Samuel, married Sarah Everson, the sister of another of my great great great grandmothers Mary Everson, and the Everson sisters’ brother William married Ann Harrison Grice. In actual fact this means that William is a further great great great grandparent of mine.

Still with me? Not to worry if you’ve lost the thread…

By now I had found out a lot of extra detail about Richard’s family, though, so I decided to include it in my tree in any case – as a detached branch, as it were (ah, the joys of genealogy software!). And I kept looking sideways again and again – were there other possible Worcestershire Harrisons in Monmouthshire, and what about the census for Hartlebury and the surrounding area? I began to amass quite a collection of these detached branches (they’d have made quite a bonfire, it occurs to me now…).

Anyway, last week I decided – after a break of some time – to have another look at the elusive (but by now quite numerous) Harrisons in my online tree. One of the features on ancestry.com, which hosts my tree and many thousands of others, is that members have the option of sharing information and the system notifies you of possible matches in someone else’s tree. And lo and behold, there was one for Mary. I have become quite sceptical of these notifications as they are often hopelessly off-target, but I took a look in any case and there was indeed a tree containing Mary, with the same suggested year of birth and detailed transcriptions of the details of her two marriages (obviously the tree owner had consulted the actual parish registers rather than online indexes (and they have confirmed this since)) AND….. two parents (Thomas and Hannah) and several brothers and sisters, including John. The marriage details in particular were valuable in that they showed the names of witnesses, who in this case were mainly family members.

Having contacted the tree owner to express my interest (and excitement) and also, importantly, to validate some of this data, I am now over the moon to have had access to their tree and the information it contains. I can now attach the loose branches to my tree and move ahead (and back) from here.

I’ve learned such a lot through this episode: the importance of hanging on to bits of information, no matter how tangential or fragmented they may seem at the time; the superiority of detail in original sources; the importance of lateral thinking; and the importance of chipping away at those brick walls again and again.

One very pleasing postscript to this story is that I have, albeit in a small way, been able to return the favour to this kind fellow researcher. Combining a detail that they had in their tree with one I had in mine, I have been able to prove that Mary’s brother Richard, at whose marriage she was a witness, in fact married Letitia Grice, the sister of Mary’s husband Jacob. Result!

The British Medical Association has weighed in on the new Prime Minister David Cameron’s Health Care Proposals.

The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves.

The Gastroenterologists had a sort of a gut feeling about it,  but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve.

The Obstetricians felt they were all labouring under a misconception.

Ophthalmologists considered the idea short-sighted.

Pathologists yelled, “Over my dead body!” while the  Paediatricians said, “Oh, Grow up!”

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it.

The Surgeons were fed up with the cuts and decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.

The ENT specialists didn’t swallow it, and just wouldn’t hear of it.

The Pharmacologists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow,  and the Plastic Surgeons said, “This puts a whole new face on the  matter….”

The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea.

The Anaesthetists thought the whole idea was a gas, but the Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say “No!”

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the Arseholes in London.

What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world? (Bonus: Consider your reflections from this month. Look through them to discover a thread you may not have noticed until today.)

I’ve decided to focus on the “bonus” element of this prompt, as the prompt itself seems a little too grandiose for lil’ ol’ me.

The most consistent message that seems to come through in what I’ve written in the last month or so is that while travel and new challenges are important to me, home is more so. Looking back, this is the way it has always been, except that the last year has – after many years of flux – seen me really settle, come to rest in the place I live:

Home is an oasis of calm and warmth rather than the lonely, echoey place it used to be. (Dec 5) .

It is thus not exactly surprise that writing on 1 December I chose the word  homecoming to characterize the year 2010.

Home and home improvements have also featured large in a number of creative and organizational projects past and future – it’s all to do with nurturing this sense of belonging and making up for a lot of half-hearted, makeshift arrangements and solutions in the past.

Many people are not contented unless they have already planned their next holiday or far-flung expedition. Happiness, for me, is more likely to be the end of a journey than the journey itself, as seen in the moment I chose to describe on 3 December. But homecoming can also be seen in a wider sense in this way, as the coming to rest, even the coming to terms, after a stage of a journey, and even if the “home” is a temporary one in the form of a tent.

Home, ultimately, is nothing to do with bricks and mortar but is something you carry within yourself so long as you feel the love of the right people around you and have the comfort of enough to eat and drink. Or at least that’s the way it works for me.

This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What’s the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?

I’ve received a lot of wonderful, memorable gifts. The one I’d like to focus on here, though, was neither tangible nor primarily emotional. Two dear and extremely competent colleagues of mine were given tenure recently after a long period of uncertainty about their (= our) future in the department. I can’t begin to express the feelings of relief, calm and confidence in the future this has brought along with it – these feelings certainly go way beyond the purely professional domain.

Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.

This year has had its share of epiphanies, cliffhangers and memorable events, and many of these I have already alluded to in other posts in this series. I’m going to take a step back here and look more at something that happened fairly quietly, in the background, but which certainly affected my life in some way.

In Summer 2009, back when I was in the midst of applying for jobs in the UK, one of the things I was considering as a possible freelance alternative was professional translating (German to English). It’s something I’d always enjoyed doing and certainly love teaching. What I didn’t have, though, was a specific qualification or equivalent experience. So after looking around at the options and asking among translator friends, I applied to take the Institute of Linguists’ translation diploma.

The registration process was lengthy and drawn-out, with an August deadline for exams the following January (2010). At some point in the interim, I had abandoned my career change plans but decided to go ahead with the exams in any case, not least because there wasn’t a refund option, but also because it still made sense in other respects.

So I travelled up to Cologne to sit the exams – seven hours in one day. There was something rather exciting about feeling a bit like a student again after years of being the one setting and marking translation exams. And it certainly reminded me of what examinees appreciate in a fair paper. A further useful eye-opener was the experience of being restricted to using “paper” dictionaries during the exam – we do become so quickly so reliant on online resources, but there is a huge amount of more peripheral knowledge to be gained from using old-school methods, as well as a different, possibly more subtle art of applying the knowledge you already have.

Much of the small talk among the candidates during the breaks centred on what preparation course people had taken and on how unusual it was for people to pass all the papers first time round. I began to feel a bit foolhardy for not having looked into any of this beforehand, but there was nothing I could do about it now so might as well simply proceed as planned.

To my delight – and, given the conversations mentioned above, surprise – I passed all three papers, with a distinction in two of them, which means I can now attach the somewhat unwieldy appendage DipTransIoLet to my name (M insists on reading the “IoL” as “LOL” and simply calls it my “LOL diploma”, which is rather sweet!).

I am pleased to be able to add this practical, skills-based qualification to my CV, as who knows what the future might bring in terms of different opportunities or changing wishes on my part. Much as I dislike the so-called Profilneurose displayed by some people in this country who puff themselves up or hide their inadequacy behind a barrage of (sometimes irrelevant) academic titles, having a relevant qualification in this are can certainly open doors to more interesting (or lucrative) opportunities.