Not a Genealogy Cage Match: Find My Past First Impressions

Alert: This is a Long Post!
For the record, this is not my actual "first impression" of Find My Past. I have used it for British research a few times over the last few years. I have not used it on a regular basis. I have received no compensation for this post and expect no compensation. This is my honest opinion.

Being Realistic

In order to give Find My Past an honest look, I will be using mostly English ancestors to test it out. I’m going to give the American records a shot, but then I will move on to what I know they excel at… British Records!

Exhibit A: Grandma Gene (Emogene Taylor-Mays-Utter)

Continue reading “Not a Genealogy Cage Match: Find My Past First Impressions”

Genealogy Do-Over: It’s not a Relapse, it’s Prep Work!

This series of posts are based on the Genealogy Do-Over Workbook by Thomas MacEntee. I highly recommend it. πŸ™‚ I just want to say there are parts of this workbook that I am not posting about, so if you would like the full set of tasks, then visit Thomas’ page or purchase the workbook.

Oh No! What did you do?

I can only blame today’s events on the craze of holiday preparations. There has been so much going on that I haven’t been thinking straight. This doesn’t mean that I regret what I just did, because you’re going to be excited for me too. In the interest of full disclosure though, I just did something that probably should have waited longer in my Do-Over.

Continue reading “Genealogy Do-Over: It’s not a Relapse, it’s Prep Work!”

William R Parkin and Ann Maltis marriage

William R Parkin, Ann Maltis marriage

Since I will be posting a timeline of William Richard Parkin on Friday, I thought I should post his marriage certificate on here as a little teaser. I recently got this in the mail from England and was very excited to jump back another generation. This record taught me a couple of things I didn’t know and confirmed some things I suspected.

  1. I had suspected that a John Parkin, brushmaker, from Sheffield, England was his father and I think this helps sway me in that direction.
  2. I was absolutely surprised when the certificate came in and it was for Middlesex county, Hampton parish. As you can tell it was registered in Kingston, Surrey, England where Ann’s family lived.
  3. William’s occupation of being a private in the 12th Lancers was another surprise. Where I know him from in America, he was a stone cutter and worked in a sand paper factory.

That’s all for now! I don’t want to give too much away before Friday. πŸ˜‰ Plus I need to update my database website with the new info.

Marriage Record of John Walter Parkin

My website has migrated to its new server and there should be zero downtime! That is definitely good news. Usually something always goes wrong for me in these things. πŸ™‚

0310-JohnWParkin-MR

To celebrate here is the marriage record for my 2x great grandparents John Walter Parkin and Jennie Featherson. I had hoped to get the maiden names of their mothers with this record. I have to say 50% is much better than 0%!

Lucky for me Find My Past had some sort of promotion going on and I was able to find census records for Ann Maltis’s family. More about that later though. πŸ˜‰