It was all happening in 1921

 The 1921 census became available on Find My Past a few weeks ago. We'll find some interesting things! This period is almost in living memory as in we can remember what parents and grandparents said about it. I'm going to delay looking for a little while because I've read of a few transcription errors and, being a pensioner now, don't fancy paying £x per search if the info is going to be wrong when I get the result.

Some of the other genealogists in the family on our My Heritage site have already started looking so you may see some info carried over to our tree soon.

Telling the story of telling the story ...

Occasionally I do the diary kind of scrapbooking in pocket-y pages. Not so often that I become one of those "Oh no, I got behind with documenting my boring life" kind of scrapbookers, obviously. You can take a peek at my Easy Pocket Scrapbooking website if you want to know what I mean. And yes, this is something else we'll be teaching on the cruise ships too!

Anyhoo ... here's a page showing a big box of old family photos Maureen (John's Mum for those who don't know her) has kept over the years. Her Dad was a keen photographer so we have lots of photos of her as a child and if you scroll down this blog you'll see some of the repair work I've done on them.



THIS IS A HINT, FOLKS !!!

Many of you have seen what can be done with the old photos and can - surely - imagine how frustrating it is to be promised photos and then get nothing. I have lovely photos from Julie and Judith on the Hills side, lots on John's side and the "Second Family" Horswills (those descended from my Great Great Grandfather Roger Horswill's second marriage) have done a lot on the online family tree which anyone in the family can join. It's the immediate Horswill family who don't deliver! I'm hoping to change this in 2014 before photos are thrown away and a big chunk of our heritage is lost forever.

Design credits: Page was made with Becky Higgins' Project Life Heritage  digital kit

We have a new website!

I moved our Horswill Family website to Weebly. It's a great system and you can have free accounts on it forever but I upgraded for a few more features. Note the cool slideshow on the home page. The other pages have a different header and it all coordinates with this blog. Oh, yes, we also have a new blog design!

If you think you might want a website any time in the future you'd better take a look now as the price of the Pro upgrade goes up a lot in a few days. CLICK HERE for details.

I changed the name of the site to The Horswill Family to make our various sites/domains/urls more consistent. It still includes ALL our various connected families! The following domains now go to the site (if they don't, try again in a day or two. I only just changed the forwarding and sometimes it takes a while to propagate):

www.horswillfamily.com
www.horswillfamilyphotos.com
http://horswillfamily.weebly.com

Please pass the word along about the new website!

Maureen at The Beach

We have a LOT of photos of mother-in-law Maureen at the beach! Fortunately her Dad, Fred Tidder, was a keen photographer. Some photos in Maureen's big box were very battered, including this one where a big chunk it was missing. Since I knew what her swimsuit looked liked from other photos I was able to repair it in PSP. Please NEVER assume a damaged photo is not worth sending to me! It's ALWAYS worth trying to fix it. Here's the result:

I couldn't decide whether to use a black and white or sepia version for the scrapbook page so used both:




Both pages were made with Raspberry Road's Seashells by The Seahore kit.

Latest Additions - Tidder, Hipson and Wise Families

I finally got round to scanning mother-in-law Maureen's huge box of old photos - and in includes some really old ones. Below is Florence Elizabeth Faunch, Maureen's grandmother. She married twice and Maureen is descended from her second husband. Florence has several photos on our My Heritage site now. You can go to Family Tree and search for her and all her photos will come up. The excellent restoration job was done by Mac from the Family History and Photography group on Facebook:



The box included a lot of the Hipson family (Maureen's Mum's side) and you can see several albums of them too. Go to Photos then look down the album list on the left for Tidder Family and Hipson-Clack Family. The photos are tagged, where possible, with the relevant names so they show up on the tree.

Speaking of photos on trees, you can download any photos for your own use BUT you must not put them on any online tree on Ancestry, My Heritage or elsewhere. If you do then impolite people will indiscriminately copy them all over the internet. We paid a LOT of money for the premium and private My Heritage site so that this doesn't happen. You'll see that I've now made this a condition of your membership of the site. You need to be careful if you are confirming Smart Matches into another tree that you then REMOVE our photos from yours.

On to more interesting stuff. My second cousin, David Williams, has done a huge amount of work on the Williams side and we've now worked out that the enigmatic Bess, she of the 1875 photo who looks so much like Mum, was in fact Mary Ann Wise, who married a Bradley then married Stephen Joyce. You can now find her in the correct place in the tree (My Heritage and Ancestry). If you know the Hills family you can go to Nan and follow the tree upwards. Just click on anyone's name to show their branch of the tree.

Using the marriage banns records I found Mary Ann (Bess)'s parents too. She lied about her age for the first marriage! Mary Ann's children took the Joyce surname when she married Stephen Joyce (well, before that ...) so I'd thought they were his children from his first marriage.

Here's the lookalike photo of Mum and Bess, her great grandmother.

An early £10 Pom

John's great aunt Florence Tidder emigrated to Australia after the war. I think she actually pre-dated the "£10 Poms". On the boat she met Mary, from Edinburgh. They became and remained best friends for the rest of their lives and lived near each other in Perth. They made a trip back to the UK about twenty years ago and we took them round the New Forest area.

Amongst Maureen's (John's Mum) huge collection of old photos was this one with the Koala. It was obviously taken by a professional photographer and was very high resolution for its day. I thought Flo deserved a page of her own in the family history album marking her move to Austalia.

The digital kit I used was Raspberry Road's Travelogue. You can see another page of their trip to Ayres Rock HERE

In pictures...

I couldn't resist making a scrapbook page of the Chosen text. Click on it to go to a larger version in our gallery. I'm thinking of printing it mural size as the answer to "Why do you bother with all these dead people?" The word art column (made with elements from WM Squared's My History kit) also features on the front cover of the report many of the family will receive soon and to the right of this blog. It took me forever to do so it's now used all over the place!