DEFRA’s financial ineptitude

First an apology to the DEFRA minister Hilary Benn, sorry but I though you were a woman, possibly Tony Benn’s wife, thick or what. Anyway that’s not as stupid a mistake to make as your spending plans, at least I can say you have a girls name.

A National Audit Office report published on the 6th March, has found that DEFRA set its budgets based on money it did not have to spend (Enron, anybody?). It seems that DEFRA approved an annual budget of £3.8billion, which just happened to be £230million more than the money allocated by the Treasury, and they didn’t do this once, it has happened for the last two years.

What do they do with money they do not have? Waste it on themselves that’s what! It appears that a survey by the Welsh Assembly has found that the average net farm income from grazing holdings in the uplands fell to just £3000 last year a drop of 63% from the year before. At the same time DEFRA spent £28.3million on the refurbishment of it’s offices in York!

Website update

Fifteen years of baptisms and burials have been added recently, with another ten years likely to be added by this weekend, making a total of 90 years worth of baptisms and burials available online, requiring only two more visits to the SRO to complete 100 years. The outstanding marriage registers will be transcribed straight after the completion of the baptisms and burials.

I have also this month started to participate in LostCousins one place study project, the idea behind this is I suppose to make a greater wealth of information available to users of their site and so generate extra revenue for them, from my point of view it should bring extra traffic my way from people who have a genuine interest in the information that I have available online.

Finally now that I have a sufficient amount of information available I have commenced the one place genealogy project for the parish – apart from the Buxton family which will be for the whole of North Staffordshire. I am however faced with two major dilemmas;

1. How to organise the study in such a way as to make it easily manageable.

2. The amount of information to include and how to best present this information.

My ideal would be to obtain funding so that I can have an application developed similar to the one used by Genes Reunited, so that it would be possible to visually navigate through the families in the parish. However in the absence of such funding I have been looking at alternative methods, and the one that I am currently considering, having trialled the complete genealogy reporter, would be compiling reports on specific surnames in response to individual requests sent through the contacts page. The amount of information to make available comes into question with this method, obviously for data protection reasons no information would be provided on anyone born less than 100 years ago unless it is proved know that the person is no longer living. With a web app I would just include dates and places of birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial, however in a report it is so much easier to include additional information such as occupations, residence etc, and if I do include this extra information should I charge a nominal fee of say £2 to gain some sort of return form my time spent researching, especially as the information would be freely available onsite if anyone cared to carry out the research themselves.

A look at this months magazines

The magazines that I’m looking at this month are Local History Magazine issue 116, Your Family Tree issue 62, Ancestors issue 68, and the March-April issue of British Archaeology.

Local History has features on; The work of Thomas Clarkson, and his efforts to abolish the slave trade, Bordesley (an inner city district of Birmingham) in 1897 and its Victorian Past, and Adam Hart-Davies recalls how he became a television historian.

The main articles in Your Family Tree are; on finding and using wills in your research, how to research Jewish ancestors, and how to decipher old handwriting. You could check out these links to help you with your palaeography skills

The Nation Archives
English Handwriting 1500 – 1700
Scottish Handwriting

In Ancestors David Annal reflects on his time at the Family Records Centre, while Gareth J Prenderghast investigates the 18th century profession of thief taker. There is also the first part of a new beginners’ guide to family history, and the Rev M C F Morris interviews a 19th century ag lab.

The stand out articles for me in British Archaeology is Mick Aston’s (of time team) look at the landscape of north Mercia, and Mike Heyworth’s introduction to a new initiative to promote archaeology in the community.