The day dawned and we were off for another round of chatting and meeting friends, together with rather too much standing up. Sadly I don’t seem to have managed to listen to any talks this year – the ones I’d like to hear mostly seem to coincide with stall duties or my own sessions. Without wishing to harp on about feet, I must mention that one advantage of listening to talks is that it does at least provide an opportunity for sitting down. Of course there is much to be learnt as a bonus!

I began by spending a short time on the Methodist Heritage stand. This weekend has seen the launch of the MyBibleChristians community website with which I have been involved. Then some surname look ups for The Guild of One-Name Studies and suddenly it was time for my own presentation on Early Twentieth Century Communities. Where did that four hours go? No error with the title of this session and it was very gratifying to have another full house, especially as I was billed against some big names. I was in Studio 2 this time and here there was much less problem with the sound. Always great to enthuse about that special brand of research that is One Place Studies.

Time then for another transformation into Mistress Agnes. After yesterday’s queues for the facilities, I had decided to use an alternative ‘rest room’ (why are they so called? – no one was resting) outside the main arena. Having left my speaker’s pass right up the other end of the hall, on my way out, I had my hand stamped with a smiley face, in order to be allowed to re-enter. I travelled back in time and realised that Mistress A. needs hose (or in C21^st terms – socks) under her never very comfortable latchets (that’s shoes to you modern types). Have I brought socks with me? Inadvertently, no I have not! Bare feet, especially feet that have been stood upon for two long days and latchets are not a comfortable combo. Smiley faces on one’s hands are not Mistress A.’s style so I start to wash it off and then realise that, if I do, I will not be able to get back into the auditorium! Just in time, I manage to retain enough of the smiley face to assure my readmission.

Great to meet some of the ladies who have been working so hard on my memories of 1946-1969 project over the past year. Their role is nearly over now and I think some are already getting withdrawal symptoms. More time spent promoting Unlock the Past cruises and booklets in the afternoon. I also seem close to agreeing to take on yet another task – heigh ho – ask a busy person and all that.

Back to the van to discover that my website has had one of its busiest days ever, thanks to an ‘anonymous’ review of yesterday’s talk, that has appeared on Celtic Connections Blogspot. Many thanks anonymous, much appreciated – you know who you are and so do I!

Day one of Who Do You Think You Are Live show today, now relocated to the NEC. We leave our caravan in good time to run the gamut of rush hour traffic and arrive in a car park some considerable way away from the NEC. I should stress that we have an exhibitor’s car parking permit but ten minutes’ walk away is as good as it gets. Our impending visit to Russia means that we have been advised to be injected to protect ourselves from Hepititis A. Ever law abiding, we have just done this, meaning that we each have an arm that hurts when you try to carry anything heavy. We have books, seventeenth century regalia and other precious possessions to transport. There is a shuttle bus but we have form for taking trollies full of books on public transport, so we opt for walking.

On arrival, I do a reccy of where I am to be speaking and the helpful tech guy loads my presentation on to the lap-top. I start the rounds of saying hello and showing my face at the four stands where I have a connection. Great to see copies of my ’Til Death us do Part: causes of death 1300-1948 book for the first time.

Photo by Julie Goucher

Then it was time to give the talk that was actually not about creating your family. Pleased to find that the capacity audience did not all walk out when I explained the mistake. I was speaking in studio 4. For those who have never been to these events, ‘studio’ is somewhat of a misnomer. It basically means a screened off part of the arena. The problem with studio 4 is that it is dangerously near to studio 3. The decidedly weird headset and the PA system to which I have been wired-up means that you can’t hear what you are saying. To make matters worse every word uttered by the speaker in studio 3 is loud and clear; it is interesting and makes it very difficult to focus. After a few minutes I have learned to zone out studio 3 and my session seemed to go well.

Then it was time to give way to Mistress Agnes and I hasten to the ladies to make the transformation. The queue is probably the longest I have seen since I went to a pop festival in Hyde Park in the 1970s. If I wait at the end of this Mistress Agnes will not be putting in an appearance toady. I shuffle past all these ladies, many of whom have crossed legs, muttering ‘I am not going to the toilet, I am just getting changed’. I then entertain the queue by struggling in to shift and bodice whilst squashed between wash basins and hand dryers. Mistress Agnes and Master Christopher attract a fair bit of attention from the show’s official media types, still we don’t do this to keep a low profile. Spent some time on the Unlock the Past stand, advertising our Baltic cruise. After eight hours on our feet we call it a day but of course we get to do it all again tomorrow.

Back to the van to find a Swords and Spindles’ booking in my inbox – busy times.

I am just starting to catch up following the Guild of One-Name Studies conference at Forest Pines Hotel and Golf Resort. Which I followed up with the enjoyment of Granny activities. I came away from the conference with loads of new ideas and inevitably, little time to put them in to practice. I was on ‘meet and greet’ duty, a great opportunity to say hello to long-standing friends and to get to know those whom I had not met before.

The programme was hectic, with plenty of learning opportunities. First a session from Laurence Harris of My Heritage on ‘Collaboration, Cooperation and Communication’. I got on my soap-box and expressed my long-held reservations about ‘matching’ on commercial family history data providing websites. The resulting mega trees may be something to boast of but where is the merit of having a billion individuals on your un-sourced pedigree, about whom you know nothing? Many of these links are probably incorrect in any case. This quantity over quality trend is not part of the hobby that I recognise as family history.

Later I had the opportunity to chair Tessa Keough, who was encouraging family historians to learn more about techniques and context via webinars, online courses and other means; if only everyone would take her advice. Then I was acting as chair again for a session by Alan Moorhouse about the use of Facebook, something else I would advocate. Apparently 19% of the world’s population are on Facebook.

Isn’t it just typical, this was the weekend that we lost an hour due to the clocks going forward. Difficult enough for me to stay up late to socialise at the conference banquet under normal circumstances but minus an hour as well….

Sunday morning brought the usual ecumenical service. Unfortunately we lacked a keyboard upon which to play hymns. The venue were very obliging and offered to source one for us and to their credit they did – just a shame it was a computer keyboard! I presented my interactive session on publishing options. For ‘interactive’ read – I have to keep quiet, whilst the audience do all the work. These sessions seemed to go very well and there was some very positive feedback following mine. Then a very interesting, information packed session on DNA from Maurice Gleeson. All great fun and next week many of us get to meet again at Who Do You Think You Are Live. After two years’ worth of trolley disasters (see blogs for February 2014 and February 2013) we have vowed not to take a trolley this year.

I have been looking forward to my participation in the Unlock the Past Genealogical Baltic Cruise. This week saw me spending a small fortune on shore excursions and booking an appointment for a Hepititis A injection (recommended apparently for visiting Russia), whilst my partner in crime rescued our foreign currency from a windy Morrison’s (other supermarkets are available) car park. Now to decide whether or not I really need a ‘beverage package’ and to ponder the advice to take a ‘cocktail dress’. Cocktail dress? I barely recognise the word ‘dress’. I wonder if a seventeenth century version would suffice?

It has been a very exciting week on the Swords and Spindles front, with the postman delivering not just shiny advertising signs to affix to the car but also various ebay acquired artefacts. Our initial approaches to schools (hampered by the steam driven internet) have been very positively received, so these are exciting times. We are now on Facebook and looking for ‘likes’ so, in the interests of shameless self-promotion, I am mentioning it – no obligation, just saying!

Then there was a really bumper day post-wise when I found on the door mat not only the proof of a 1930s local history book that Buckland Brewer History Group are reprinting but even better, images of the whole 1941 National Farm survey for the parish. These were acquired on our behalf by a selfless volunteer (or maybe they just didn’t know how to say no to my tentative request!). This just goes to reinforce what I have always known, that family and local history fans are generous in the extreme.

Whisper it very quietly but it does seem that my communications are restored to their former glory. After wasting another hour of my life listening to how important my call was, I manage to organise a repair to my telephone line. It was with great excitement that I saw the engineers’ van parked outside the following day. Shades of Marie Celeste, there were no repair persons in said van but a van nonetheless. Although this did restore my phone temporarily, it was merely destined to lull me into a false sense of security. It seems that they were actually repairing someone else’s phone. It was a further two days before the telephone engineer called to say my line was restored. Great, I thought, now my internet speed will return to normal, instead of being intermittent and so excruciatingly slow that pictures would not appear on many websites. Not so. A slight sense of panic at this point. Apart from the general frustration, one of my jobs is wholly dependant on vaguely decent (by rural standards) internet speed. To say nothing of wondering how I would deliver my remote presentations to Canada in my seriously pixilated state. Well, as I type (and I hardly dare say this) things do seem to have returned to that happy state we call normal. Now to catch up with all the tasks that have taken twice as long as they should over the last couple of weeks.

Have you ever had one of those weeks? I recently arrived in a town not especially near me to deliver a talk and discovered that my notes were fifty miles away. Those of you who have heard me present will know that I don’t very often use notes but for this particular talk they were pretty necessary for the first twenty minutes. What to do? Could I wing it? Ah, then I realised that the text of the talk was on my computer, which I have with me for power point purposes. Fortunately I was early enough to copy up the basics on to a purloined piece of paper. This was more difficult than it sounds because I can’t read my handwriting at the best of times and this was not the best of times, as I was wearing contact lenses and had not brought my reading glasses. By extending my arms and squinting a bit, I managed with a combination of speed line-learning and scribbled headers in large letters. Hopefully my audience did not notice the join.

Then I was due to present a Hangout-on-air. By its nature, this requires an internet connection. I returned from a few lovely days in granny mode to find that I had no electricity. An adjustment of the trip switch and it was restored – so far so good, hurrah. It turned out however that my router was deceased. I sneaked to the village shop, laptop in hand, to gain sufficient internet access to find the required telephone number. A quick call to an offshore call centre. ‘How old is your router?’ I am asked. Well I don’t celebrate its birthday but probably pretty old. Is this relevant? It is dead, whether it died of old age or not seems immaterial. ‘We will send a replacement in three working days.’ Unlikely, as this would be a Sunday but I am at their mercy. ‘Helpfully’ they tell me that I can track the progress of the delivery online. This does of course require me to be able to get on line. The good news was that it arrived within 48 hours. The bad news was that this 48 hour internet black hole coincided with my need to present the Hangout-on-air. I couldn’t even prevail on a neighbour, as it turned out that a severe local storm had knocked out numerous local routers. I did my best but sometimes technology (or lack of) gets the better of us.

I have now had confirmation that I will be giving two presentations at the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa conference in September. These will be in person this time, so not dependant on the health of my router.

For those who are waiting for the electronic version of my ’Til Death us do Part booklet on historic causes of death it is now available.

How does one spend Valentine’s Day? Sharing a romantic meal with one’s beloved? Staring at the sunset? Even a trip to Paris? No, I spend it dressed in seventeenth century costume, drumming my way through the streets, in the company of a regimental rabble, commemorating the Battle of Torrington, which effectively ended the first English Civil War in 1646. I don’t get to drum very often and my previous performances have been of the English March (affectionately known as ‘going to the shop’). This year there were only three drummers and the one of us who actually had half an idea of what was going on (that would not be me) decided that we would go for the Scottish March, on the grounds that it was slower and might be easier on the hangovers of members of our accompanying pike block. In fact the Scottish March is easier but it was of course different and when our leader put in twiddly bits, I was reduced to drumming randomly, smiling and hoping for the best. By the time we reached the town square though we were actually managing to pretty much keep together.

Drumming, even for less than a mile, makes you heartily sick of marching beats, be they English, Scottish or whatever. Goodness knows how troops coping with twenty miles a day put up with repetitive beats – they were probably all deaf from the constant noise anyway. Even with a small troop and three drummers it is pretty noisy, what with the drums and the soldiers hurling abuse at the enemy, especially when walking through the streets adds an impressive echo. Imagine how the inhabitants of small village would have felt when armies of up to ten thousand men marched through. This battle commemoration always gets the hairs standing up on the back of ones neck. Great to celebrate local heritage in this way.

’Til Death us do Part is now on sale and will soon be an ebook. I have also been writing for the Worldwide Genealogy Blog and of course I am working my way through the chapters of my (still to be titled) book, based on the memories of some lovely ladies who are recalling the years from 1946-1969.

Mistress Agnes has been round and about a bit lately – apart from her drumming episode. She has being describing the duties of the seventeenth century housewife, accompanying Master Christopher, when he talks about the weaponry of the time and tomorrow her topic is ‘The Civil War in the South West’. There may be exciting times on the horizon for Mistress Agnes; I hope to be able to reveal more soon. This week is very much one of those, ‘It is Wednesday, I must be talking about writing up your family history’ weeks, with a day course and a half day course to deliver, as well as the individual sessions – heigh ho – at least I don’t get bored.