I failed to account for my labours last December! My excuse is that we were having an extension done and this deflected me. Now I can account, in so far as I can remember, for the last six months.

After the Berkeleys I did get down to the Visitations and as they were mostly for northern counties, there was not quite to much to do. I remain ambivalent about the Visitations. On the one hand they are priceless souvenirs of a period three and four hundred years ago. On the other hand the published versions are mostly not from the best manuscripts and some are a jumble of two or more visitations together. And finally too many of them include long pedigrees with no supporting evidence and no dates. But I now have over 3,600 people in my database who are referenced at least once in the Visitations.

I have spent some time going through Keats-Rohan's Domesday Descendants - her Domesday People was done over a year ago. This has been an interesting and sometimes infuriating challenge. Normally the names are different from those in other books, so a load of cross-checking has been needed to ensure I have the right person. Then there are a few clear errors where one person's entry conflicts with another's: so I had some correspondence with Rosie Bevan for her collection of amendments to these two excellent books. And there are now 1,325 people in my files with a mention in Domesday Descendants, 404 in Domesday People and 164 in Domesday itself.

In this update I have no longer excluded the peripheral Berkeleys from the main file. I found this inconvenient with my own use of the Internet file as I regularly wanted to see everyone and not a restricted list. The result is that the main file is now some 1500 people larger than otherwise, bringing it up to just over a whopping 18,000. A point to remember is that every person has been separately entered, there has been no bulk entry from GEDCOMs. Further each of the entries in the past four years or so has only been after some examination of some sensible book or document and against each person I have put the information sources. One day I mut get back to my very early entries and put down where I got the information from.

I have had a bookplate designed! This was along the lines of the formal one my grandfather had done for himself and which I thought would be appropriate for my heraldic and genealogical collection of books. Now I am thinking of getting an informal one done for my shelves of novels.

Plus lots of updates and modifications from the soc.genealogy.medieval, the medieval genalogy discussion group. Plus the steady stream of e-mails from people who are related to me or to someone on my database - hi to you all!