Financial & Travel Musings

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Family history is very much an on and off affair over the years for me. I find that it’s largely made up of short bursts of activity when some new information source becomes available or I hear some snippet by chance.

Thus only a few weeks ago I had a major breakthrough when I found that the 1901 census was finally online.

I hadn’t expected this to add an awful lot of information to my records as the 1911 census did. That one filled in a lot of detail about branches of the family and completed locations for me. I wasn’t expecting much from this one as everyone on the 1911 census would be on the 1901 census and I’d locations nailed down at 1896 so wasn’t expecting any big changes there.

However, there was one key thing on it: the family weren’t in the same house in 1901 as they were in 1896 and 1906. This has quite a big impact as my grandfather was born in 1899 which means that I can now get his birth certificate when previously it wasn’t found on the traces (because of the incorrect address).

Interestingly, it also confirms that my grandmothers name was Jane and not Jean/Jeannie as everyone thought. That difference seems to be down to the Ulster Scots pronunciation: she was always “ginnie” which younger folk in the family took to mean Jeannie when in fact it was the familiar form in Ulster Scots of Jane.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Just about every magazine has some fantastic weight loss stories in it but even when you stick to the recommended diet it just never works for you, does it?

The reasons behind the differences are basically down to attitude, exercise and supplementary things that somehow get missed out on in the stories. Rarely is it the case that a simple diet will lose massive amounts of weight for anyone: you just have to factor in some kind of exercise. What you’ll not hear about in the stories are the small amounts of exercise that can make radical differences to the effectiveness of a diet plan. They’ll not talk about the fact that they started using the stairs rather than the elevator or that they parked their car at the farthest end of the car park but little things like that add up over a period of months.

Similarly, you’ll hear about the diet plan but you won’t hear about all of the things that they don’t eat any more. Even simple things like changing from taking orange juice in the mornings to taking water will make a considerable difference over a period of months.

Finally, you aren’t them. You aren’t starting out from the same point as them nor have you put on weight for the same reasons. Thus a diet for you may well be entirely different from one for anyone else.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The problem with eczema is that it’s virtually impossible to work out what the underlying cause it.

Despite years of trying with our little guy he still gets eczema here yet generally doesn’t when we’re in our place in France. Now, you might think that there would be oodles of difference between here and there but in reality there aren’t. Yes, he’s out more over the year there but then he’s out just as much over the summer here. The food that we eat isn’t all that different either.

Yet still he gets it here a lot but only rarely there.

Popularity: 1% [?]