Start Your Family Tree Week - 26 December to 1 January

Next week, apparently, is Start Your Family Tree Week, a celebration which escaped my attention last year. It seems to have been started in Ireland, last year.

To celebrate this week, and no doubt to jump on the holiday season competition bandwagon, FindMyPast will provide tips and hints next week, and is running a competition.

There are lots of prizes:

• A day with Else Churchill at the Society of Genealogists including return travel by train to London and two nights' accommodation in London
• Subscriptions to the British Newspaper Archive, Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, family history societies, Family History Monthly magazine,
• Family Tree magazine
• Tickets to Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE 2012
• Family Historian family tree software packs

You'll need to be quick off the mark, though, as you need to visit their Facebook or Twitter page for a new question to answer every day between 26 December and 1 January, and then send the answers by email by 10 January 2012.

More information on FindMyPast's competition.

However, the real winners will be the people who start researching their family tree or who make progress with it. Good luck !

Another Isle of Man Collection Added to Family Search

I've just discovered a family member in a new collection indexed by Family Search.

They now have 4 sets of vital records for the Isle of Man though there's a warning for the first 3 collections that only a few localities are included and the time period varies by locality.

• Isle of Man Births and Baptisms, 1821-1911
• Isle of Man Marriages, 1849–1911
• Isle of Man Deaths and Burials, 1844-1911
• Isle of Man, Parish Registers, 1598-1950, containing baptisms, marriages, and deaths.

All in all, there's over 300,000 records included, and that must be good.


There's also a full list of all 891 of the Family Search collections.

The family member I found was Hamlet Lowe who married Catharine Ware at Braddan, Isle of Man, on 08 Jan 1788, though, of course, I still need to check that he is the correct one. I wonder where she was born, as there's no mention of her birth in the Isle of Man.

New Additions to Digital Six-inch Maps of Scotland, 1892-1960, at National Library of Scotland

The National Library of Scotland have made available a full range of the Six-inch 2nd and later edition maps of Scotland, 1892-1960.


That's just what we've been waiting for. It was revised for Scotland from 1892-1907, and then updated regularly until the 1940s. You can zoom into the detail of the OS six-inch maps using an interactive index map, and search by county, parish and a gazetteer of place names.
You can order digital images and prints.

Use the maps link or the county links below, click the sheet on the map that you want, then at the left select the actual map you want.



Berwickshire

Peeblesshire


Roxburghshire


Selkirkshire

Scott's Selkirk - 3rd and 4th December

Just a reminder that it's Scott's Selkirk in Selkirk (Scotland) on 3rd and 4th December !

This annual event is loads of fun, people in old-fashioned clothes walking around, decorated shops, stalls in the High St with interesting things to taste and unusual presents you can buy for Christmas presents.

It commemorates Sir Walter Scott, and there's re-enactments of him presiding in the Court-house; but there'll also be tours of the prison under the main road, the A7, music in the streets and the Square, childrens activities at Halliwell's House museum and fireworks to finish the festival off.
According to the website there's tours of Haining House (with mulled wine) but that's not mentioned in the program.

More info about Scott's Selkirk.

I try to go every year, however the weather caused its cancellation last year.

Even though there's snow on Soutra, I hope it's going ahead this year.

See you there ?