| ~ In The News ~ Updated 12 September 2007 |
| I have begun (starting Labour Day 2005) a 40 class genealogy course, each class takes 6-8 weeks. I'm planning to get my certificate in Canadian genealogy, and after that I would like to become board-certified. After that I may move on to US, English, Scottish, and Irish certificates. I'm still working on them and I'm past the half way point. My grades are reasonable and most classes are enjoyable. |
| I have located several new cousins, and this means that more information is flying around. I will soon be starting new lines on this site. They will relate to my BATTEN and McLEAN lines. These lines have a lot of people in them, so hopefully someone will find a link here. I also need to start adding the pages of other families related to the SPARKS families, so WARD, CRANDALL, HANCOCK, HARVEY etc etc etc. |
 |
 |
|
|
| Cousin Sami has managed to find an early marriage of Emma Phyllis SPARKS, daugher of John SPARKS, and Jane WARD. Poor doll was 15, and the guy was 30-35. It seems it didn't last long. Maybe it was a shotgun, and the shotgun was later not needed? |
|
|
 |
| I have located a possible HANCOCK relative (and a definite one) and we are working out the most distant relationship. Mary Ann HANCOCK was wife to John SPARKS and mother to my second great grandfather, Sam SPARKS. We are trying to find the link between Mary Ann's father, George, and a previous generation. |
| I am not a huge fam of Ancestry.com. Despite the fact that they have some information online which can be helpful, I have found them to be lax in checking transcriptions, leaving it to US to do their work for free. They cahrge a good deal of money for it, too. I'm not saying the service should be free, it costs money to keep servers running, but I think they should have much better service. |
| A lot of what they have is a rip off, and very hard to trust, so I was not surprised when I read that they had literally stolen peoples' pages from FREE Rootsweb, and put them into their own paid database. These people were surprised to find their work stolen, and Ancestry was forced (after many complaints) to remove the pages. Here is a link to Rick Roberts' article about it. |
| Through my journey to find out more about my Somerset ancestors I found a site called "FreeReg" which works by volunteers transcribing Parish records and then donating those transcrptions to FreeReg so everyone can see them. I'm probably doing myself out of a job, but I am now a volunteer with FreeReg. |
|
| I have begun to write a book about the SPARKS lines and hopefully that will be something archivists and other researchers find helpful. A lot of work is still needed to get it ready, though. |
|