What with the job I must not mention and visiting family, I have been a little quiet lately but behind the scenes things have been as hectic as usual. Firstly, I have been writing and recording my contributions to All About That Place. This is a free online extravaganza of short presentations, all loosely associated with family history places. It runs from 27 September to 6 October. You can find out more and sign up here. There is an international line-up of speakers and there will be so much to learn and enjoy.

Both of my presentations are on 1 October, which is the day dedicated to Town and Country. I chose to record my sessions and you will be able to access them after the event if you can’t make it live. If you do want to watch live, 11am (UK time) is my first slot, when I will be telling the story of my great great grandmother, Anne Stratford. Anne counts as an ancestor that I am particularly attached to. After I had moved away, having spent three years living in Buckinghamshire, I discovered that the road I’d been living in was the road where Anne lived as a child. Until that time, I had no idea that I had any connections to Buckinghamshire. If that doesn’t make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, nothing will.

The talk is about Victorian life in rural Buckinghamshire and the dependence of the community on the straw plait trade, with a bit of Swing rioting thrown in for good measure. Inevitably, the original talk was far too long, despite my talking very fast. I will also be mentioning Anne when I am talking about the role of women in farming communities for the Society of Genealogists on 30 August. You can join this day, which includes other excellent presentations about researching agricultural labouring ancestors, online, though this one is a paid event.

What is lovely about All About that Place is that so many of my friends are also presenting. Seven of the A Few Forgotten Women team applied to speak and all were accepted, so we have nine talks on the programme between us, most of which are Forgotten Women based. We are also frantically getting ready for the next Forgotten Women communal research day, known as Forgotten Women Friday, on 24 August, which focusses on pupils from two schools for the deaf.

Talk two for All About that Place is at 2.00pm and is an introduction to The General View of Agriculture, an invaluable series of books that don’t get anything like enough prominence. Come along, or listen after the event, to find out what you might learn about your rural ancestors from these volumes.

There are various hazards when recording talks. Now that I have no landline, I can at least turn the phone off but I am left with the seagulls, which are fine in winter when you can shut doors and windows but in summer you have to hope they are elsewhere or boil.

More online fun starting next week with another run of my course for Pharos Teaching, which helps set folk on the right path to writing and interesting family history. This comes with the (optional) opportunity to have a short family history story critiqued. The prospect of this always engenders mild panic but basically I just comment on particular strengths and make constructive (I hope!) suggestions for improvement. Last time I looked there were still spaces, so why not decide that now if the time to put fingers to keyboard and make some sort of coherent end product from all those research notes.

I also have edits of my next book about the history of women at work to work through – busy times.