Category: Reviews, Reports and Research
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Caution
The first thing that I discover when I reach the top floor of the Mitchell Library, the Archives and Genealogy Centre, is a sign on the Gents toilet before you enter the Archive room. “Caution (in capitals) this door is liable to slam shut unless it is held”. This is not the only sign that…
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Scrapbook of 2025
This is my annual review of what has happened on Instant Cousins since the beginning of the current year. I’m looking back to make sense of how I have been mapping my family’s ancestry and other stories. It has been quite a journey around the UK, seeking out stories that I have pieced together from…
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Newspapers
I have taken out a subscription to The British Newspaper Archive at a cost of £99 for the year. This gives me access to every newspaper that the Archive has digitalised, which is quite a considerable number of newspapers and magazines. It has a powerful search engine which, if you input the correct information, such…
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The 1921 Census Returns
Today marks the arrival of the 1921 Census returns, for England and Wales, on Ancestry.co.uk. Of course, the 1921 returns have been available since January 2022 when the National Archives gave the initial three-year contract to publish them, to Find My Past, who were the highest bidders for the contract. Now that the contract has…
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Great Uncle Harry (Palin)
If my blog was a book, then this is how I would like to approach it. Michael Palin was able to write this book because he was handed a pile of notebooks and diaries and other papers relating to his Great Uncle. He supported this with a lot of research into the historical context of…
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Ramblings….on archives
I am recuperating from a serious cold this week and have not had the mental energy to produce research for my usual blog post this week. That has not stopped me from reading. Two things have come to my attention that made me think much about my family and house research and the accumulation of…
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Anniversary Review
It is a year since I created this blog and I thought I would share some thoughts about its progress. Instant Cousins started as a result of my frustrations about how I could write about by research and how to publish it. A couple of years before the Covid lockdown I had attended a brilliant…
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Grace, in her own write
My Mother, Grace Carver (William Wilcox’s eldest daughter), often talked of the number of places and houses that she lived. I think she once told me that she lived in 26 different addresses. That would be with her parents and in married life. I can certainly make a claim to six of those addresses. This…
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Akenfield
I have been reading this book after I read the author’s obituary earlier in the year. Ronald Blythe lived in Suffolk and created this oral history of the village that he lived close to. He kept the name of the village anonymous and the name Akenfield is invented from possibly two other village names. He…
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An Average Victorian Family ?
My title poses the question because I was quite interested in the size of my Great Grandmothers family. In the space of twenty years she had given birth to twelve children, two who lived for very short periods of time. Apparently this was not unusual other than the number of births. The National Archives reports…