Category: Reviews, Reports and Research
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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…