Comments

...a generous, genial gent...

I am so very sorry to learn this.  Brian was immensely helpful to me when I first contacted him many years ago regarding my Selwood family.  He will be very much missed.   

Gosh!  Thanks for these hints, Rob - hope others find them useful, too

Jenny

David - I can assure you that it did emanate from Peter de Dulin and we appear to have fixed our gmail problem, many thanks

Jenny

Good tip re Digital copies of certificates! I shall do that too.  I have a few but the one that made me the most emotional was my maternal grandfather's after WWll 1947. In the days of scarcity of telephones I am fairly sure my grandparents had one as they had had the money and social position to be in the forefront of most innovations for fifty years. Likewise my parents living in Central London, where my father was a theatrical agent, probably did too. So when my grandfather died and my parents got that phone call it was barely 24 hours  later when my father reported the death to the registrar! Seeing his name on the document really conjured up a picture of the situation, imagining them rushing down to Surrey to take charge. ( I have only recently found all these details having only known the year as my mother didn’t think to tell me her father was buried relatively nearby in Cheam). Lots more to discover I’m sure.

Secondly I found a different way to use Family Tree Maker. I store in here any research for people with connected names even if they may not have a link to my family – sometimes you cannot see the wood for the trees (pardon the pun). I have tended to use lower case for the surnames and/or forenames which sort of works but then people of the same name are separate in the index and sometimes you miss possible links. The Colour Coding that was introduced recently certainly does help a lot and  have used extensively but it is not always permanent.

So what I have done is used the title field. I have not got many of the gentry in my tree so there are not many Lords, Ladies, Sirs or Dames to worry about.

I have put an asterisk in the Title field on anybody not connected to the family directly.

Here below is a selection of John McLEANs (from Antrim mostly)

The ones I know are mine are in Red.

Press the 1^st button in the top right corner and “Use titles if available”

Then this is what I get

So I can now concentrate on who I want and all the others have gone elsewhere in the index. But I can then easily return to compare individuals.

I suppose you could group all sorts of people together using different characters/prefixes  but I have found that it does make a big difference for what I am trying to do.

Thanks for listening

Rob