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August to September 2001

I have moved much of my internet site again. Demon, the home provider, will only allow 20 Mbyte without paying horrendous monthly subscriptions that are more suited to a commercial operation. And I wanted to store well above 20 Mbyte; further the downloads from my site were getting towards Demon's free limit of 40 Mbyte of fast access a day.

So I tried Rootsweb as it seemed the obvious choice for a genealogy site. At the same time I rebuilt my web family tree using the Generations package, which while fast in use, occupies over 30 Mbyte on its own and consisted of thousands of little files, one of each family and one for each person, 17,000 in all. But loading this onto Rootsweb both took ages and continually failed. After about 300 files, Rootsweb gave up and stopped receiving. It took me the best part of a weekend to get it all across. I vowed, never again!

Another problem with Rootsweb is that they do not allow you to put on your site with them files for people to download, such as GEDCOMs. Instead they want them put on the World Connect site, where on loses control and where I have had difficulties uploading in the past. So, regrettably, Rootsweb is not fit for my purposes.

Then I tried Yahoo/Geocities. Indeed the files would load in one swoop with no interruptions but they would not give me enough space nor would they reply to e-mails asking for more. I had put the GEDCOMs there as these were what was causing the excess downloadings trouble with Demon and redirected that part of the access from Demon. And I continued to look round.

Eventually I found Freewebz which promised as much space as you wanted, etc, etc and all for free. Not wholly true as this was only for files that you constructed on their site, not for files sent over from my computer. For that you need FTP access which is a very reasonable 30 dollars a year. While they, like Rootsweb, fall over when receiving loads of small files, they would accept it all zipped up and then unzip them on their site - brilliant, much faster than anything else. They only allowed 50 Mbyte at the first thrash but a further crossing of palms with 10 dollars of silver gave 100 Mbyte more. I transferred everything across including a load of old family pictures and am now a happy bunny. Let me know if anything does not link up properly.

Freewebz, by the way, had a few initial problems in that they did not give me read access to replace and thus update files. There seemed to be something wrong with their software but they also corrected it quickly and have given good service. I think they are very new on the scene - and hope they last for a long time!

In the process of all this I have updated my genealogy tables again. They include loads of extra information from the CDROMS of the Visitations of Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset. While Visitation records are not totally reliable, particularly for generations beyond the grandparents of the person interviewed, even this gave me some very useful snippets of the other members of families of our ancestors. And I have added in earlier generations where there was cross-correlation with other sources.

I am still in acquisition mode, buying these from second hand bookshops:

And a prize gift from my father, who must have received it from his father: In the course of an extended browse round Chris Phillips' super site , I came across Ivan Sanders' very interesting account of the early Saunders family of Charlwood, Surrey and of the Saunders of Wales. He had produced a load of useful original material and the odd questions which I may have been able to answer from my Twysden book. We are in the process of exchanging documents and I hope the result will be a larger corpus of Saunders material on the internet.

For those who have been following my story of my great-great grandfather, William Bartholomew, ostler and innkeeper, you will be glad to hear that I am at last in possession of his and his wife's, my great-great-grandmother, death certificates and I have also obtained a copy of his will. Interestingly he got my great-grandfather, his son-in-law, to be an executor and he left the relatively large sum of £1,400. The will, dated 1882, established that William P-L was then living in Tonbridge, Kent and only later moved to Wallingford where he rapidly became mayor - after a previous lifetime of indolence.

And in that regard I should add that I am in the process of typing out the highly flattering newspaper account of his, William P-L's, death and funeral.

This is merely one of the many things I have in the pipeline:

Sounds like I'll be busy for the next year or three.

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