Elizabeth Wood … or Woodn’t?

It’s been a while since I’ve written or posted anything here. My apologies – it’s been a bit of a wild time here with me of late, but the sun is shining here in England this weekend so I thought I’d ignore it and write up an old post I had on the go!

If you think that I don’t write about my paternal side very often, then spare a thought for the family of my poor husband – they barely ever get a look in! Consequently, a message on Ancestry regarding some matches on that side made me revisit one particular line, that of Elizabeth Ellis Wood … or was she?

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RootsTech2024: Registration is OPEN!

If you don’t know about RootsTech then, quite frankly, where have you been?! It is the largest gathering and grouping of genealogists in the world, and happens every year at the end of February in Salt Lake City, Utah (for obvious reasons).

I am attending once again, and I have the pleasure to tell you that the wait is over …

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Updates on Updates (Hallid-updates)

This shouldn’t be a long post, but I think that I may have blasted through the research quagmire of my Hallidays in Sherston that I mentioned last time. (Soon it’ll be back to business, i.e. more Holborows, more Murrays, some asylum records …)

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Updating Old Research – The Hallidays of Sherston

I should be preparing for a dinner party (do people still have dinner parties?!) tonight – for which I did a heck load of preparation for yesterday – but instead I am sat here with a messed up foot (we call it a Dom Special – I fell out of my trainer, and also off the edge of my stone path in the garden). It happens on … well, not a regular basis but more often than you’d think a grown adult would fall over (I once fell off the edge of a flip-flop and messed my ankle up, and once I fell over in a flat field and managed to break both my elbow and my wrist).

But I have been re-examining some inherited research again lately. I mentioned it a while ago as it forms part of my Halliday family work which I considered a bit of a done deal. Only … there were a lot of gaps in the data. Dates and no locations. Parents but no baptisms. Spouses and no marriages. You know the drill by now about double-checking everything, and not relying on other people’s research. Well. Egg all over my face.

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An Account of Some Murrays

In my musings, I very often neglect the tales of my father’s English family, especially those of his maternal grandfather. For this reason, I’ve been taking another look at the early Murray families to see what new information I can uncover.

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Pointless Research

Does all the research that we do have to have a specific point? Do we always have to be ‘on’ as researchers, beavering away at our own lines and families? Can we – should we – be allowed to undertake research that is just for fun?

Spoiler alert: Abso-effing-lutely we should. In the words of Blanche Devereaux: “It keeps you healthy, keeps you in shape. Keeps your buttocks firm.” Alright, so not exactly (after all, if genealogy did that, then Jazzercise would never have been invented…), but it allows us to firm up our researching muscles whilst providing our brains with some free-wheeling time to mull over strategies for solving other research blockers.

Case in point …

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RootsTech 2023: Online

Following on from my previous post reporting on my personal highlights of being boots on the ground in Salt Lake City for RootsTech, here is a short taster of the classes that I’ve been able to catch up on using RootsTech On Demand …

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RootsTech 2023: In Person

As I sit and write this, I am people-watching in the Salt Lake City airport, with three days of conference and 7 days of residency behind me (and a rerouted 14+ hour flight home ahead of me …). But apart from wishing I was on the plane to Honolulu at the next gate, I am also thinking about all the people I’ve met, all the things I’ve learned and all the experiences I’ve been exposed to. And, yes, all the food I’ve eaten …

So here it is: my review of RootsTech 2023 In Person!

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52 Ancestors: Outcast

I had written half a blog for last week’s prompt (Social Media) but hadn’t got around to finishing it before this week’s prompt came around. Sorry about it. Now on to this week’s writing!

Outcasts. My immediate thought was to look at social outcasts: the undesirables. Hobos. Vagrants. Tramps. Vagabonds. The demonisation of the poor is nothing new, and something that is still prevalent in society today. In fact, in the UK, the first piece of legislation making it a crime to be unemployed (known as idleness) dates to 1349.  A vagrant was a person who could work but chose not to and, having no fixed abode or lawful occupation, begged. Vagrancy was punishable by being branded or whipped.

I’m pretty sure that if this was suggested today that a surprising (or not so surprising??) subset of the population wouldn’t have a problem with it.

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52 Ancestors: Oops

This week’s prompt seemed a bit familiar, so I checked my Archive from 2020 and here is the first time I wrote on this theme. All of that still holds just as true today as it did back in 2020 – and no shade to Amy for recycling prompts!

I’d like to think that with experience comes wisdom and that I am less prone to research oopsies. Still, this past week I did order a birth certificate for a suspected illegitimate Holborow birth which I discovered 20 minutes after submitting the order had been double registered with the obvious birth father’s name as well. So I am definitely not saying I am infallible. (And, yes, it was incredibly irritating.)

But have there been any earth-shattering oopsies in my research, something that has meant unpicking an entire family line and/or hours of research? Or have I ever uncovered someone else’s oopsie?

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