Dad's 70th Birthday Party 30 July 1995

The photos of this party are not too good. I'll be cleaning them up and rescanning them shortly. In the meantime I see plenty of cameras in the pictures so it would be good to have everyone else's photos of this brilliant day.

Here's a Smilebox album for you:

Create a scrapbooking design

The "Membership" Problem

There's no getting around it - peeps need to join various sites in order to share info and photos. Flickr is a great way to share photos but trying to explain how to join and then get into our albums is a pain. If you'd like to do it the info is HERE.

The best method I've found is the My Family sites. These are private sites which allow you to upload FULL size photos. Remember - you can make Sharon cry if you send her less that full resolution photos. There are also other features like the full Ancestry family trees on there and blogs if you want to play with them. You can even change how the site looks for your personal profile. No, you don't need to write an essay about yourself. Just your name will be fine - pic if you want to put one on there.

Like Flickr, there's a tag "cloud" so you can pull up all the photos of Nan etc, or at least you will be able to do that once we have the photos and tags on there!

The site are here:

www.horswillfamily.com

www.hillsfamilyphotos.co.uk

We have separate sites so we don't bore you with relatives you've never heard of and also so we get double the monthly upload limit. The limit is huge so don't worry about using too much. If you do we just wait until next month, no problem.

Joint family occasions will be on both but feel free to join both group sites. Once you've done that you will find them both in "Family Groups" on the toolbar at the top when you log in to your My Family account so you only need to log in once. You can also copy albums from one group site to another. You have to redo your tags though. Nothing is perfect!

Did you know .....?

On our Horswill and Hills Families My Heritage site www.HorswillFamilyTree.com you can

1) Add people to the family tree
2) Edit information on the family tree
3) Change your profile photo if you don't like the one I've given you;-)
4) Check which celebrity you look like
5) Print your family tree in lots of different ways
6) See the tree in modern or classic view (button bottom right)
7) Join in discussions
8) Add articles
9) View the timeline
10)Post events
11)Invite other members
12)Add photos *

* I'm going to pay for unlimited storage as soon as funds allow - ie as soon as I can get some work done and get paid for it - so please reduce resolution to 800 for now. (The system reduces the photo you see anyway so anything higher is a waste. This is NOT the best site for downloading photos - we have other sites for that. This is for adding photos and having fun with them) You can then go nuts and make good use of the "face cloud" that detects who is with you in family photos.

... and much more! Did you see the slideshow at the bottom of the home page? Go to photos and you can see several different kinds of slideshows. Hours of amusement!

Please join in and let other members of the family know about it.

The "Official" Launch of Two Family Sites

The time has come, after many wee small hours working on the sites, to tell everyone about them! So here they are:

Horswill Family Photos

er... it's about photos! Lots of photos, lots of relatives, lots of ways to see them and lots of nagging by me in order to get hold of them in the first place.

Look around. Tell the family! Sign up for our newsletter HERE and you'll know when new photo albums are uploaded.

Horswill and Hills Family Tree

The clue is in the name ... Our family tree site is on My Heritage. The domain www.horswillfamilytree.com goes to it so it's easy to tell your family.

Please become a member if you are a Horswill or Hills or their relations. You can just look or you can join in and add what you know to the tree. Obviously we would love you to do that. Everyone has bits of knowledge that no-one else has.

Confused about how the family tree site works? Go to this page.

Lastly in this long list of links, we have a group on Facebook HERE.

I hope you enjoy the sites and will keep an eye on them as they develop. Please ask if you have any questions.

Now to get on with my business website. What's a bank holiday weekend?

Permanent Tagging - what's that?

Tags are the clever things that enable you to find hundreds of photos of whoever all at once. If you click on the "Betty Horswill" tag in Flickr (more on Flickr later) you will get a whole lot of photos of my Mum ;-) The problem is someone has to add these tags to the photos in the first place. So when I add photos to Flickr I type in the tags. Even if you do this for the whole album it takes forever.

I now have the ACDSee Photo Manager which enables me to add tags that stay with the photo forever. (It adds the tag tothe image XMP file for the geeks reading this ....) So no matter where I upload the photos or whichever computer they're on the tag will still be there. You can download a free trial of this software HERE.

There's are two small downsides to this

1) It's no good me putting the tag "Dad" on a photo with this method because if you download that photo to your own computer and you're using tags my Dad is going to come up instead of your Dad which could be a tad confusing. We're going to have to have some tagging protocols like using the full name or a name by which we know them for photo purposes. For example Nan Hills will be Lizzie Hills, my Dad will get the tag John Horswill and other John Horswills will need a middle name. My Dad didn't have a middle name and anyway it's my ball so I set the tags! I'll put a list on the main site of the tags being used.

Much more on this later. Oh yes there is another downside:

2) I need to retag everything in Flickr which essentially means starting again with that and there is the small matter of work to be done this month.

A "Need to know" basis?

Although this article is clearly plugging the BBC's you-only-get-on-it-if-you're-famous programme there's a lot of truth in it. See post below for the truth in their final paragraph!

Do I tell the stories about Grandad? Do I write about the very sad tale of Ellen and her baby? Close Horswill family already know these tales, indeed I've already been asked not to include Grandad in scrapbooks. Others don't know and are now wondering about what I'm talking about. Do they need to know?

All will be revealed. Or maybe not. Since we're mainly concerned with photos we can ignore some of the unsavoury bits of history.

The Genealogy Gestapo

I love being in the Horswills group on Facebook (which is partly why I'm writing here so they don't throw me out for writing this on the wall ....) and I love finding new cousins.

Many years ago my Dad and I researched the family tree. Not particularly through parish records (for goodness' sake, don't the genealogy freaks realise how many lies those contain? Duh....)but through family stories and remembrances. The best way to learn about your family is to ask members of the family but sadly we often leave it too late to do that.

My ancestors were tin miners in Cornwall and moved to the mining areas of North East England when the tin ran out in the 19th century. How do I know this? Because my Grandad told me so and my great grandfather had told my Dad. Why on earth would anyone lie about that?

Dad and I researched the family tree after I got in touch with Wilson Horswill, a methodist minister who was preaching at my local church in London. We couldn't quite work out the connection but Dad remembered a Wilson Horswill "with a funny name but they called him Wilson" . His first name was Moses, Wilson was his middle name. Dad had met him at family funerals. Guess what? That makes you family! You don't go to funerals at random, do you? Especially when you're a child. When I went to Canada in 1978 I stayed with Wilson and Ruby's daughter, Chris, and have since met up with her brother John Horswill and his wife, Dorothy. These people are my cousins. We're all descended from Roger Horswill, my great great grandather, who was born in 1829, some from his first marriage and some from his second. It's not rocket science.

Well, apparently not according to the self appointed family genealogy expert who shall remain nameless, although we could just call her M. Very apposite in a MI5 way.... I had a letter from her years ago asking for what we had. I duly sent it. Not only did she say Dad and I had it all wrong, she said it in a thoroughly nasty manner. She arrogantly declared that my new cousins were not my cousins at all. Fortunately said cousins and I had a laugh about it and made a unilateral declaration that we were indeed cousins and would remain so regardless of what some horrible woman might tell us.

There are ALWAYS complete control freaks who take it upon themselves to be in charge of the family tree. They use genealogy as a poor substitute for proper academic study. They NEVER give anyone else credit for the work, as a true academic - or indeed a true relative - would, indeed they claim it as their own. This command position somehow gives them the right to lord it over everyone else and be extremely rude. This is the kind of person whose achievements in the real world are so limited that they would consider it the ultimate accolade to be captain of the golf club and relish having the honour of a named parking space.

Of course there are lovely, charming cousins who are also researching the family tree and who are perfectly normal people but they don't get a look in, their research is never credited and they probably have a bin full of the nasty letters too.

This dreadful woman's snitty correspondence with my Dad so upset him that he gave up looking for relatives and now he's gone it makes me mad to think she stopped him finding his family before he died. It also makes me mad that she's back and about to put a lot more Horswills off having anything to do with it. There are Horswills missing from that Facebook group. I know who they are and why they're not on it. They haven't realised that it's a friendly "we are all family" thing and are wary of the Family Tree Police.

You remember my story about the tin miners? Well, apparently they either don't exist or we're not related to them. Apparently the South Devon Horswills were geographically challenged and couldn't work out how to get to the tin mines just across the river Tamar.

The Horswill family is small enough that all Horswills appear to be related and yet my family is not in it. We're the lost tribe. How ludicrous. At least we have ex FA cup hero, Micky Horswill, in our tribe. "My cousin's boy" is how my Dad described him. Good enough for me, and indeed for Micky's family who wrote to Mum and Dad for years. Anyone who declares "there are no famous Horswills" should be ashamed of herself. I find it hard to believe that anyone who can do family tree research on the internet can't use Google. But then they wouldn't want any actual facts to mess up your theories, would they?

OK, rant over, we'll see how many Horswills are still speaking to me. I hope it's most of them as the Horswill Family Photos site is almost ready for public consumption and I want to invite them on to it!