This morning I got up full of good intentions about what I was going to accomplish. The first priority was obviously to make breakfast and read the Guardian, from cover to cover, except for the sections that I don’t read. I had about 60% of this task completed when Mrsjohnm55 asked if I knew how to add some one to an email group. I know how to do it with my work email, but we use Lotus Notes at work, and because it is Lotus Notes, the method will be completely different to any other programme ever written. Being male I was reluctant to admit that I wasn’t sure how to do it in Windows Mail, because I have never needed mail groups for my private email. I came upstairs and opened up my email to work out how to do it. It turned out to be as simple as dragging and dropping contacts into the group. However..
One of my hobbies is Family History, and I subscribe to ancestry.co.uk to help with the research. One of the things they do is email you if someone else is researching one of your ancestors, and there in my in-box was an email telling me that some one had found something on one of my 3x great-grandmothers. I had tried to get a better handle on who she was for a while so I clicked the link. I checked out the information, it wasn’t a significant addition to what I already knew, it gave me an actual date of birth as opposed to the month and the year that I already had. Actually it might be the date of baptism, it wasn’t that clear.
This got me thinking about one of my other 3x great-grand mothers. Checking out her death certificate, I decided to find exactly where she had died. I couldn’t find the address on Google Maps. On a whim I typed into Google “Map of Kelso 1870″. This took me to the National Library of Scotland’s digital map archive. I found the address that she had died at. As I sort of guessed the street had been renamed sometime in the past century and a half.
Maps fascinate me, especially old maps. I don’t know how long I spent exploring the last three centuries of Scottish Borders via the maps I found in their archive, but it was a significant amount of time. If you like old maps have an explore of the site. It is first class and free. Just expect to lose an hour or two of your time.
I thought I might as well check Twitter (@john_m55) and that looks like an interesting article @so-and-so is tweeting about, I’ll check that out. That link in the article looks worth following as well. Should I look at my RSS feed to see if there is anything interesting there, of course there is, I wouldn’t be following these people if they didn’t say interesting things. Another half-hour gone. Might as well check Facebook before I shut down, nothing too much going on, except my sister tells me she has a friend who is cycling across the United States and is blogging about it, so naturally (cycling and cycle touring in particular is another of my passions) I had to check out his blog Bicycle Across America, more time gone.
And now I am blogging about it.
