Worthwhile Suggestions

Surround and conquer.
Go backward to come forward.
The timeline is your best friend.
In searching, don't filter too quickly,
refine.
If you can't find the truth in the story,
check out the storyteller.

The above suggestions to genealogists come from John Reid's blog of today (or was it yesterday). John lives in Eastern Daylight time, I live in British Summer Time. No matter.

But they don't half fit the last ten households I have just transcribed. One with initials for given names who said the family consisted of 4 females and 3 males but admitted 2 boys went to school; two with lists of very legible given names where the sexes didn't fit; one where the head of the household wrote his entire schedule in invisible ink but signed his name on the back; and, lastly, the young couple of 23 and 22 where he listed his wife as exactly that--"wife".

I hope we shall be able to find the "storytellers" in other documents to discover the rest of their stories.

Transcription of St Andrew's has now reached Division 4 of 5. Provided swine flu doesn't catch up with me I will make my deadline.

A good day

I passed Folio 400 in St Andrew's yesterday. That makes the ward one-third done. Completion should be in early August. After that, only one ward to go! St Patrick's and St Andrew's each contained between 1100 and 1200 houses.

Yesterday's section was a breeze. Not one "invisible" schedule and just the odd word or age which proved to be unreadable. Tomorrow's session should be very interesting. It includes Upper Canada College in its original home on the south side of Queen Street. Glancing forward yesterday, I noticed the homes of various masters and teachers. I await to see if the pupils are listed--the school itself may not be in its proper place geographically, but stored in the file titled “Institutions and Goals” (not my spelling mistake, by the way) on the St Patrick's film.

Happy Canada Day, by the way!

I hear you haven’t had the best weather for it, not like here. We are into the second week of the Wimbledon tennis and there has only been one 20-minute session of rain. With our longer days it is very hot.