Apparently no mystery writer ever in the history of writing has owned a cat. If they had, they wouldn’t assume that a twitching curtain in an empty house means that someone is inside, hiding. Piglet would twitch the curtains just to screw with people’s heads.
Randomization Fun
And by “fun,” I mean the opposite of enjoyable.
I’ve been using the unindexed Irish Parish Registers, via the catalog, at FamilySearch. But, they’re unindexed. And they’re kind of a pain to navigate, because disparate parishes are tossed together in the same microfilm set, and other parishes are split between sets. There may be a rhyme or reason to it, but I can’t figure it out.
These are fairly large image sets, too. The one I’m working on right now has 3500+ images. It’s important to be methodical and not lose your place. There are a couple of things that make this tolerable:
1. There are start and end images, created by FamilySearch, for each film within the record set. The start image has a bunch of metadata, including the diocese, parish, the date it was filmed, and the types of records contained. So Aughagower Parish, Diocese of Tuam, baptisms, filmed on 24 May 1984. And the structure should be fairly stable, so you can link to an image and have some expectation that someone else can follow it.
The end image just tells you you’re at the end of that particular film.
2. You can navigate from image to image by keying in the image number. So if you stop one day with image 1204, you can pick up the next day with image 1205. I’ve made master lists for each of the sets I’m searching, with a break-down of each film, the parish it covers, the record type, and the image numbers that correspond to it. So I know that I finished Aughagower Parish recently. Maybe.
This week I noticed that the images had been shuffled. Totally, completely, randomly shuffled. I have no idea what is what. Aughagower Parish should be contained in fiche 007768669, images 4-259. Only now? Those image numbers are meaningless. There’s no way to tell what parish any particular image corresponds to. If you look at image 188 in fiche 007768669, you should find a start image for Aughagower Parish marriages. Instead, it’s a page of baptisms from 1879-1880 from who knows what parish.
This is a giant mess.
ETA 4/13: I opened a support ticket with FamilySearch on 4/12, and it looks like the problem has been fixed, at least with fiche set 007768669. That was fast!
Construction Crane with Belt of Venus
Happy Tuesday! The rain has finally ended, and the sky is clear and beautiful. So clear, in fact, that the temperature dropped overnight. I had to scrape frost off my car windows this morning.
Strong Unrecommend
I thought I’d be clever and clear my browser history. I navigate from the address bar a lot, and sometimes the drop-down menu gets cluttered. No big deal, right? But when I cleared my browser history, Firefox got hung up. I eventually force-quit the program, via task manager.
Huge mistake. When I restarted Firefox, it wouldn’t start in regular mode. Safe mode worked fine, but starting in regular mode made the program freeze before it even got to the start screen. Force quitting made n error message pop up. There was something wrong with the add-on container. A web search indicated it might be a Flash problem, but I was unable to fix it. One of our tech support people found a work-around. He created a new user profile, which seems to be working. So far, so good, at least.
Tech support is willing to do a little maintenance for Firefox, but if it breaks too badly, we are told to use Chrome instead. I really don’t want to use Chrome. I have a “one service from Google” policy, and that one service is Gmail.
I hope I don’t run into the same problem on my own machine. If I do, though, I’ll just switch to Opera. Opera isn’t supported at work, though. Hmf.
So, I strongly unrecommend doing what I did, whatever the hell I did.
Budget Solutions
With Frances injured again (AGAIN!), it’s clear that some things need to permanently change. One of the things that has to change is that she can no longer have any access to getting on the furniture. She hasn’t got any sense, and she’ll see or hear things that require her attention RIGHTTHISMINUTE, and launch herself off the couch like a little black torpedo. Not good for a dog with bad joints. So no couch.
I also needed to find a way to block her line of sight to the back field, so she doesn’t react to every thing that moves out there. I priced static cling window film, but it was going to be around US$50 to cover just the lower portion. That’s ridiculous. I have tissue paper on hand, though, and wheat paste is cheap and easy to make, so that’s what I used. It worked great! If I do it again, though, I would use much less wheat flour. The paste was awfully thick, and it doesn’t need to be, for my purposes. I also wouldn’t add the flour to already boiling water. That creates an unholy mess of lumps that then need to be strained out. Instead, I’d mix the flour and water, whisk it until it’s smooth, and then cook it.
I’m happy with the finished product, though. It looks decent, it was easy to do, and the total cost was about 10 cents.
Poverty Relief Loan to Walter Baskwell 26 Apr 1841
Ireland, Poverty Relief Loans 1821-1874
26 Apr 1841 loan 859 to Walter Baskwell, farmer, Lukane
witnesses Owen Moran, farmer, Curvey and John Basquill, farmer, Lukane
This comes from a comment on the last post. I don’t know who this Walter is. I suspect he’s the brother of “my” Michael, as he’s living in Lukane (Lackaun), which is the townland where Michael and his siblings were born. There is no way to prove that, though, at least not yet.
Confusing matters is the fact that there are two Walters who were born about the same time, in the same area. Cousins, maybe? One married Anne Kelly, emigrated to Stockport, England before the 1861 census, and died there in 1886. The other married Annie McFall and emigrated to New Zealand.
So which Walter took out the loan?
It’s also possible that both Walters, with wives named Anne/Annie, were living in the same area of Ireland, then the same area of England, at the same time. It could be Patrick and Mary Giles/Mary Scahill all over again!
I thought I’d blogged about that mess, but I can’t find the post. Maybe I dreamed it? The short story is that there were two Patrick Basquills who emigrated to England. One married Mary Giles, and the other Mary Scahill (sometimes spelled Cahill). If you are researching Patrick Basquills living in Stockport, England in the late 1800s, you need to be very careful. Otherwise you might find yourself conflating the families of Patrick the bricklayer and Patrick the hatter. Patrick the bricklayer married Mary Giles. Patrick the hatter married Mary Scahill. Patrick the bricklayer was the son of James Basquill and Mary Holland. I’m not sure who Patrick the hatter’s parents were, but most of the Ancestry trees I see him in have his parents as Patrick Basquill and Catherine Moore. I don’t think that’s correct, though, because as far as I can tell, their Patrick married a woman named Margaret Moore (strange coincidence, but they happen).
Anyway, it’s possible that some of the English census records I’d assumed belonged to Walter and Anne Kelly actually belong to Walter and Annie McFall. I need to look more closely at the information I have, to see if I can tell if there are shenanigans going on.
Piglet Sleeping on My Flannel
It’s a lazy Saturday with much Netflixing. I just realized Piglet, sleeping on the couch behind me. He rarely does that. And he’s got his head on my flannel.
I would have gladly strangled the horrid little brat this morning. He was at his naughtiest. But then he goes and makes himself sweet and adorable and all is forgiven.
Surf’s Up!
I mostly like the Storm weather app, but it has some icons that are a little odd. And then there are the occasional high surf warnings. We don’t actually have surf, being land-locked. I assume the warning is for high water on the Ohio River.
I see you are eating a food. I, too, love food.
Frances is still wobbly, but she’s improving. And, obviously, her appetite is just fine!
Seen at Work
Tyrannosaur Reading a Book
red paper boat 