You may have seen in the press and on social media, reports of the consultation on wills. In summary, there is a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) proposal to digitise all original wills and, once that process is complete, destroy the original records. No one is questioning the importance of wills. They are not only important to family historians but to local historians, community historians and other historical researchers who may be using wills for a variety of reasons, including researching the language of wills, the handwriting, and even the writing materials used. You can read the details of the ..read more

Do you miss those face to face genealogy events? RootsTech London, Who Do You Think You Are?, Family Tree Live!, The Genealogy Show? I do. I don’t feel like I’ve quite settled back to normality yet post covid and I’m missing being in a big room with a bunch of like-minded people! Recently I asked on social media what events people knew of face to face. Here are some of them: The big in person events The Family History Show 2nd September 2023 Kempton Park Racecourse https://thefamilyhistoryshow.com/york/ AGRA Conference 8th-9th September 2023 Cambridge https://www.agra.org.uk/conference/ Famil ..read more

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that the website for my other business, Pharos Tutors, is now LIVE!  Pharos Tutors offers short online courses and certificate programmes in family history, local history and related topics. Today we have launched the brand new Pharos Tutors website and online course experience. We have been working on this for a long time to get it right, and have now completely rebuilt all the Pharos Tutors systems to give an updated look, a more robust experience, and many, many improvements to better serve the current size of the business.   Key features incl ..read more

Those of you who follow me on social media will know that I’m an avid reader and have something of a book buying compulsion. Let’s just say the pile of books in the “to read” category far exceeds my available free time in the near future! Still, it is always better to “be prepared”… It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that this is not a recent book release review. Published six years apart, The Stranger in My Genes, and its sequel, Strangers No More, are a pair of books that I purchased around a year ago and had been lamenting in that lonely “to read” pile ever since.  The Stranger in ..read more

Subscription site update The Genealogist issued a press release today revealing the addition of 125,000 records to its headstone collection. These records are to be found in series RG 37 at The National Archives and relate to the removal of human remains and the associated headstones (not just headstones) and are a fascinating source of information. You can access the collection by searching the “Deaths & Burials” section in Master Search and filtering down to “Headstones”. Here is an example of a Cowling record, located at St Paul, Chester Road, Hooton, Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. The ..read more

The Announcement RootsTech has just finished in Salt Lake City in the US and we were all excited to find out the latest innovations from the big companies. Personally, I’m always looking out for the DNA-related announcements. Some big news from My Heritage is the announcement of the release of its new DNA tool, cM Explainer. The following comes from the press release [1]: “cM Explainer [is] an innovative, free new feature that accurately estimates familial relationships between DNA Matches. For every DNA Match, cM Explainer offers a detailed prediction of the possible relationships between th ..read more

Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) have recently released some fantastic new tools which are of great use to those of us using Y-DNA. Y-DNA is not the DNA you test at Ancestry, My Heritage etc (that’s autosomal DNA), it is the DNA that is passed relatively unchanged down the male line for many generations (see diagram below). The descent of Y-DNA Y-DNA is often used by those running surname studies as, in principle, the descent of the male line is the same as the descent of the surname. Y-DNA can therefore be used to assess the likelihood of all bearers of a particular surname arising from the same sin ..read more

© Suffolk Free Press, first published September 2018 Not the smoothest start Like many of you, I have had a mixed 2022. I started January on enforced bed rest following emergency surgery to repair a detached retina. Whilst the recovery took a lot longer than anticipated, I am happy to report that I am now much recovered. I will never get the full sight back in that eye but I am able to do everything I need to with glasses now, so I count my blessings it was operated on as quickly as it was (thanks to our marvellous NHS! ). Research and DNA On the genealogical research front I was deligh ..read more

As you know, I take my genealogy research very seriously but sometimes it’s good to have “just a bit of fun” with it too. Many of you will have seen My Heritage’s tool, Deep Nostalgia, which was released in early 2021 and brought photos of loved ones “back to life”. The latest tool from My Heritage, AI (Artificial Intelligence) Time Machine, is set to allow us to travel in time! If you are user of social media you will probably have seen people posting their results already. There have also been some reports about it in the press, such as this article from the Daily Mail. Here you can see an e ..read more

Abbey Gardens, Bury St Edmunds It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post. This fact is heavily connected to the fact that it has been a long time since I was able to carry out any “proper” genealogical research. You know the sort, where you actually venture into real archival repositories (instead of being constrained by covid to online research only). Recently I was delighted to make a trip back to one of my favourite archives: Suffolk Archives at Bury St Edmunds. I mean what’s not to like? What more perfect route to “work” could there be than a walk through the Abbey Gardens, followe ..read more