It has been a while since my last post but I have not been idle. Buckland Brewer History Group published a book last month and I’ve been frantically wrapping and posting, watching the pile in my kitchen diminish as orders come in from hither and yon. This was a joint project, involving contributions from fifty people and we are very proud of it.

I’ve been really knuckling down to my writing project and now have nearly half the chapters completed, with several others well on their way. I don’t want to give too much away but let’s just say, in line with many of my talks, this book does concentrate in the grittier side of life. It has led me to some wonderful online sources. Following an excellent talk about the Temple Lodge Home for Inebriate Women that was given to Devon Family History Society by Liz Craig this week, I decided it was time to tackle the scheduled chapter on the inebriate. Liz had pointed us to The Birmingham Black Books, what a treasure trove. This is a record of ‘habitual drunkards’, complete with photographs, who were identified in the early years of the twentieth century. The book was issued to local publicans so that they would not serve those who were included. My work-in-progress book includes a series of case studies and I have spent most of this week following the life of one of those black-listers, Sarah Grosvenor, who chalked up over 200 drunk and disorderly charges. I am really frustrated that I can’t identify her during the first forty years of her life as I feel that might shed some light on why she ended up on this path.

There have been exciting family history discoveries of my own too. Access to the 1921 census as part of my FindmyPast subscription means I have been following up the extended family and I have discovered another relative who spent time in a mental hospital, then known as an asylum. I have been able to access the case books and – cue really exciting bit – letters survive between the sister on the patient and the institution. I am able to have copies of these letters, which I hope a lovely researcher will get for me next month – watch this space.

I have also revisited the family history of the fisherman of my acquaintance, looking at a branch that hadn’t been examined for several years. Newly available records did reveal the need for a bit of tree surgery. The branch that was lopped off were his geographically further flung ancestors – they came from a parish seventy miles from where he was born. Now I have identified the correct Elizabeth Nicholls, every one of his direct ancestors, on all lines, was baptised within fifteen miles of where he was born. Is this some kind of record? I also managed to crack a persist brick wall finding, that his 3x great-grandfather invented a surname. You can’t fool me Robert, I know who you really were.

The Cornish Adventure continues – more of that in a post of its own soon. Most of yesterday was spent biting the Mastodon bullet. As people seem to be deserting Twitter in droves, I’ve joined others in the genealogical community who have set up accounts on this social media platform that pretty much no one had heard of three weeks ago. Here one Toots rather than Tweets and it proves that there are new learning curves to be mastered and that every day is a school day. You can find me on Mastodon here.

The other bandwagon on which I have jumped is the new app from MyHeritage, which using AI to turn you into a Viking, a Green Goddess, a Punk Rocker or even a cyborg. This is free to try for a limited period. I do have a few reservations about this, particularly regarding creating ones that lead you down the path of mis-appropriation of ethnic identity and then there is the whole issue of tampering with the evidence that is original photos. I do think it might be something that would be a way of interesting young people in the past, although there is a strict ban on using this with photographs of minors. So how does it work? ‘Upload 10-25 photographs of yourself’. Do I even have 10-25 photographs of myself that don’t go back decades? I managed to scrape together ten by dint of lopping off the other people in them. Then the weird and wonderful images were created. Some are decidedly odd and distorted, probably because I only uploaded the minimum number of photos. In some I look like the late Queen but others have said the same, perhaps this is a default. I leave you with (allegedly) me as a Celt, in the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1980s. I think the 1970s one is my favourite as that does actually look like me in the 1970s. I have spared you the cyborg.