Looking down towards Builth just after 7 a.m. yesterday morning.
I know - I should be doing housework. I HAVE to do some later on but for the moment I am in a delightful steady frenzy (IS there such a thing?!) of family history research involving people and places in the 18th C on the Isle of Man. I am like a dog with a bone! I have solved a family mystery which has been neglected many years and research is so much easier now that so many more links and documents are put on-line. I am currently perusing the actual parish registers which have been scanned - AMAZING!
As I only had snippets of names and very sparse details which had come down from Keith's dad, who sadly died when Keith and I were just friends, it was not a very easy journey. BUT yesterday I made a huge breakthrough and have found the family holding and what was happening there around the 1890s from a book written in 1945, reliant on wonderful memories from the oldest people in the parish who knew everyone who lived everywhere, even in long-ruined cottages and plots. It also looks like I have been researching in the wrong parish for some of "his lot" as they appear to be hefted elsewhere. I still have to trace beyond g.g. grandfather though and that hasn't been easy. No cast iron links - just guestimates until today, but now I am confirming notes I made back in 2000 when the only tool I had on the internet was the basic IGI (it is now MUCH improved and called Family Search).
Fascinating to see the the common folk (our lot and their neighbours) chose family names for their children - John, William, Philip, Patrick, James, Ann, Mary, Margaret with the occasional more exotic Isabel or Elinor. The Royal Naval births, however, really went for originality - how about Victoria Sophia Alfrida? Or Belvedira Clarissa Eliza? Or John Adolphus Frederick? So, I am immersed in Kellys, Cowleys, Quayles, Christians, Sayles and Shimmins . . .
Anyway, yesterday very early I went for a long walk, right to the very top of the hill this time, so my fitness levels are definitely improving. Today I treated myself to "Walking the Old Ways of Radnorshire" - a companion to the book in the same series which is of Herefordshire. I hope there will be soon one of Breconshire too, which is actually the county we live in, although it is part of Powys now. So, lots of photos and not much in the way of writing, but you probably know I just LOVE to research and so I am like a terrier down a rabbit hole and keeping cool at the same time.
