Well that's me back from the National Family History Fair at Newcastle, after a great couple of days in the city. I travelled down on Friday to do some client research at the new Newcastle Library facilities - an amazing place! I spent many hours going through old trade directories, electoral rolls and all sorts of material, a great place to do research, and I look forward to a visit to the city archives soon.
The fair itself took place yesterday, at a new venue, the Tyne Suite of Newcastle Premier Inn. The event was a tad smaller compared to that held at the previous venue in Gateshead, but had a much nicer feel about it, and much less stressful! It was busy constantly throughout, whereas before the mornings had tended to be busier and then much quieter in the afternoon.
I was down to help introduce the three excellent talks given by Amy Sell of FindmyPast, Audrey Collins of The National Archives (Kew) and Jeanne Bunting from Census Detectives. As such I did not have as much of a chance to get around to talk to vendors as in previous years. I did pick up from Sharon and Ian Hartas of UKBMD that a new series of BMD indices for civil records will soon be going online for the Cumbria region which may be of interest to those in the Borders with family just to the south. The lovely folk at the Scottish Association of Family History Societies were also there, and have just produced a new version of The Parishes, Registers & Registrars of Scotland, which is a handy guide with parish maps and more, costing £4 (see http://safhs.org.uk/SAFHS_Shop.asp). I also spoke to Nigel Bayley of S & N Genealogy, who was a happy bunny about a recent piece I wrote on the new Tree View software on The Genealogist.co.uk website, which is a free to access site, and rather impressive. What I didn't know though was that there is now a Facebook app version of this, located at http://apps.facebook.com/tree-view/ - well worth a look.
I did bring my new camcorder this time, and had intended to grab a few words with a few people there. Sadly, however, I was only able to grab one quick chat, with Amy from FindmyPast, which is reproduced below. Amy works as a marketing executive with the company, and was lucky enough to join the Battle of Britain memorial flight last week, which FindmyPast were part sponsors for. Amy is a contributor to FindmyPast's blog at http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/.
A huge thanks to Amy. Keep an eye out for the new Family and Local History Handbook 13 early next year, and if you can get to Newcastle for the event next year, you won't be disappointed!
Chris
www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
Professional genealogical problem solving and research
http://twitter.com/ChrisMPaton
Researching Scottish Family History (New book)
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