Skip to main content

In praise of spreadsheets!



event 1st name Surname date place mother father spouse abode notes
bur Thomas Holyland 28 Jan 1564 Desford




marr Jane or Jone Hollyland 20 jan 1570 Desford

Henry Dammaske
maybe 1571?
bur Elizabeth Hollyland 26 aug 1571 Desford




marr Thomas Hollyland 8 Aug 1573 Desford

Agnis Shepston

bap Henry Hollyland 9 March 1574/5 Desford






No, come back --I'll try not to make this too boring!

In late 2019,before I joined the Guild of One Name Studies (GOONS), I did an introductory online course about setting up such a study. The course tutor urged us to use spreadsheets for the collection and correlation of information and I have to say that I felt dubious.

I'm not particularly techie-minded. I can use the basic functions of a microsoft office spreadsheet but was hardly in thrall to them.

But over the long January evenings, when I was starting my ONS, I decided to give it a try. And I have been totally won over! Building my family groups and trees, and correlating dates and facts is so much easier via spreadsheets!

I started by downloading separate lists of birth, marriage and death registrations from FreeBMD, which turned out to be surprisingly easy. Other spreadsheets followed, for similar events before 1837, court appearances, Holyland wills - it was necessary to input these manually, which was tedious, but ultimately very useful. I've designed the headings of each spreadsheet to reflect the information that I find most useful.

With these spreadsheets I can spot patterns at a glance. I can organise the columns into any order I choose, then back again to the original (eg, alphabetical order has been invaluable for grouping children by mother's maiden names). A quick hit of the search button solves many a query. Cross correlation between, for example, the marriage spreadsheet and the wills spreadsheet backs up findings quickly and easily.

I could wax lyrical for much longer about my spreadsheets but I did promise not to bore you all, so I will simply say - if you haven't already tried it, then give it a go! You might, like me, find that you quite like it!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holyland - a surname, not just a place!

Holyland - a name and not just a place! Of all the surnames in the world, Holyland is one of the less common. The website Forebears.io uses data from 2014 and tells us that Holyland is the 594,449 th Most Common Surname in the World -- or to put it another way, not very common at all ! According to the Forebears site, approximately 522 people shared the Holyland surname in 2014. The majority (about 2/3) of these were in England; the majority of the other Holylands were in Australia, with tiny numbers of others of this name scattered across the globe, from the USA to China and Jordan.                ( map and data c/o Forebears, https://forebears.io/surnames/holyland) So where did this surname come from? When I found the name in my family tree --it was the maiden name of my great-grandmother - I felt quite excited, assuming that this maybe signified a link to the ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Swimming lessons

Arthur Holyland was born in 1877 in Wortley, a village to the north of Sheffield, in Yorkshire. Like his father and grandfather before him, Arthur trained as a blacksmith. When he was a child, Arthur's family moved from the rural setting of Wortley and into the heavily industrialised centre of Sheffield, which at the time was one of the world's leading centres for the manufacturing of steel items. In August 1899, Arthur enlisted into the Royal Marines, giving his age as 2 years younger than his baptism proves. He served on a variety of vessels before being invalided out of the Marines in 1908. My eye was caught by a small box at the bottom of the Marines enlistment form . "Able to swim?" – Yes, Arthur could swim – he was tested on this in December 1899, in Deal, Kent, four months after joining the Royal Marines. How did a blacksmith from a heavily industrialised town in a landlocked county learn to swim, I asked myself. It transpires that in 1892, a tidal swi...
Post a Comment
Read more

An unusual marriage certificate

  Willoughby Holyland was born in 1868 in Lutterworth, Leicestershire; there is no entry for his mother’s maiden name on the birth registration, implying that he was illegitimate. He was listed in 1871 as “Willie”, the 1 year old son of Charles Holyland, a shoeing smith in Lutterworth, and his wife Ann. Three other children were listed in the same family, including a William apparently only one year old than “Willie”. Immediately this duplication of names sounds suspicious! Charles repeated that he was Willoughby’s father, as well as William’s, in 1881. In 1891, Willoughby, now a tailor by trade, was still in Charles’ and Ann’s household, but this time described as Charles’s nephew. Willoughby’s marriage certificate sheds light on his true parentage. In August 1899, he married Lily Sarah Beatrice Davies at St Jude’s Church, in Birmingham. In my experience of looking at Victorian marriage certificates, those born illegitimately usually either have a line drawn through the box ...
Post a Comment
Read more