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Thanks for dropping by :-) This blog contains an assortment of tips, advice, resources and other useful bits and pieces for anyone researching their family history in the UK and Ireland. If you want to keep up with the posts, don't forget to subscribe using the links to the right.

Saturday 18 July 2009

New Twitter Meme: Surname Saturday

Just a quick post to let you know about a new Twitter meme (is that a tweem?) called Surname Saturday organised by Thomas McEntee. It should be a good way of getting more genealogists to use Twitter, and you can find out more here.

Thursday 16 July 2009

Does tweeting run in the family?

Sorry for the prolonged absence - life got in the way :-( Pesky life. Anyhoo, I've just posted a question over on Twitter:

QOTD: Which of your ancestors would tweet? What kind of tweeter would they be?

I'd love to hear your answers?

Tuesday 13 January 2009

1911 UK Census Now Online

The UK census for 1911 has been published online. Or at least, a substantial part of it. Scots records won't be available until 2011 due to differences in privacy laws. Welsh records, and those for some English counties have not been uploaded yet.

It's free to search the database, but there is a charge to view the results. So far, there is no sign of it being made available for free for a limited time as the 1901 census was.

Saturday 3 January 2009

Did your grandma eat baps, cobs or buns?

 It doesn't really matter, they are all the same thing - a bread roll!

OK, so you know who your ancestors were, where they lived, what they did for a living, maybe even what they did for fun and what they looked like - but how did they speak? Did they have a pronounced regional accent, or even use a form of dialect? Maybe they were very grand and only spoke the Queen's English?

The UK has a wide variety of accents and dialects. People in the north east of England sound very different to those in Cornwall or Edinburgh*, but even if you know this, it can still be hard to imagine just how someone may have sounded, especially if you don't have personal experience of hearing voices from a particular area on a regular basis. To give an example, for the first twenty years of my life I was pretty sure I knew how people from Yorkshire spoke, then I moved here and discovered I hadn't got a clue LOL

While it isn't possible to give you an exact replication of your ancestors voice, the following links may help you to understand how accents vary around the regions, and how they have evolved over the centuries.

Sounds Familiar - a collection of sound and audio which give you practical examples of a range of accents from various parts of the UK, and also examples of older pronunciations**.

Sound Comparisons - a collection of audio files demonstrating different pronunciations of the same words from various English (and Germanic) language countries.

The Routes of English - useful for anyone who can trace their ancestors back to the Middle Ages, this sub-section of the BBC site examines the evolution of English throughout the centuries and offers audio examples of how it might have sounded way back when.

* I was once told that the people of Edinburgh speak the best English in the whole of the UK. I have no idea if this is correct, but they do have a pleasant accent.


** I found the older samples from East Anglia particularly fascinating. A lot of my family came from that area, so it was really interesting to hear how they might have spoken.