Queens' Square "Gloom & Doom" 

Went out early this morning to get my usual Christmas Day pix.  Disappointed to find the Christmas lights turned off. I suppose for economies sake but Queens Square was dim with no shop lighting on except for Boots' and they were behind protective shutters. I did a sweep pic of Old Church Road but the same thing applied there too. Nothing on but the street lighting.

Moved up to Six Ways and got a shot. Then calamity: -- put the camera back in the car and went round to get in and I went Ass over tip getting onto the path. (and this at 6 a.m. in the morning with no people about) Managed to open the car door and levered myself up using the seat and steering wheel as anchor points. Got back home and found nothing drastic except a bruised rib where my right hand had been between it and the hard path. I MUST get into the habit of always using my stick. Even on a short movement of only a few feet.

Maybe if I repeat at times through the day "Remember you are not Immortal" it will drive the message home.

Boxing day addition. "I am not immortal"  "I am not immortal"  "I am not immortal"  and don't I know it today. My ribcage is aching and my knee gives me hell. If that don't teach me a lesson then nothing will.

Odd how some pix posted on Morguefile 'click'. Some years back now I went up to Portishead to say goodbye to Uncle Bill Gale. He was moving over to the south-east to stay with his daughter after 'Betsy' his daughter who had been looking after him had died.

Uncle Bill was quite a character and had a store of interesting tales about early days in Portishead. He was originally born in Bedminster and had lived at one time with his parents and siblings, in one of the cottages in Mary's Garden on Cadbury Camp. He took great delight in informing nieces and nephews that he had not come downstairs until he was 8 years old. - Perfectly true tale because the boys in the family had slept in a lean-to abutting the little one-up one-down cottage. In fact he had never been upstairs until Ben Gale had moved the family over to 'The Wilderness' cottage on West Hill.

However to get back to my main item. Uncle Bill didn't care about superstitions and had a white cat. Somerset folklore frowned on keeping white animal pets. The same lore forbid taking Hawthorn blossom (White May) into the house. When I banged on his door he looked out and said "That damned cat have got up the ladder again. He climbs up and then can't get back down" I had my camera with me and took a few shots of the cat on the ladder, as well as one for memories sake of Uncle Bill. When I came across the negatives last year and scanned them I put some of the cat on the ladder, on Morguefile. Now I find that one of the cat looking puzzled about how to get down has clicked and had over 800 downloads in the 15 months on Morguefile.

Uncle Bill Gale 

And what a marvellous Blackthorn walking stick he has made for himself. 

Some people might be wondering why there was a gap in activity on my blog.

The reason was I was busy transcribing census records for some of the villages around Clevedon (where I live)  and my time was taken up by typing in the record pages of various places. My niece Jane had copied over the detailed pages needed and I set them into the word files to make up the records. Later they were added to Microsoft Access to permit data searches. Some very interesting Info can be found via Access.

That is the reason for the posting of the page about 'short cuts' when typing data in Microsoft Word. It is possible to save a lot of time when using the word correction tools.

I have at the moment declared a stop of activity until after Christmas. 

I will mention at this point that both myself and Jane are willing to help folk searching for family history. We have posted what Church Register data we have on the Clevedon Civic Society website and are willing if we can to find details of family in North Somerset. 

We do have most parishes for the 1891 and 1901 census records for North Somerset U.K. and for close villages for the earlier ones.

Info is derek.lilly@btinternet.com

We now have the complete set of Kingston Seymour Parish from 1841 to 1901 set on access files and can if you want, send them as Email attachments. Tickenham will follow shortly.

While idly searching on my blog pix by right clicking on the picture and selecting "Search Goggle for this image" I discovered yet another picture from Morguefile being used as a book cover.
This was a slide taken from the hill above Leyland Chapel on the Brendon Hills near Raleigh's Cross Inn. I had scanned it and then treated it with Paint Shop Pro 8 "Pepper and salt" file to simulate a water colour painting before posting it on Morguefile.

Nice to get a surprise like that.

Have a

No this is not a human heart it is a sheep’s heart but the working principle is the same. For some years now I have been suffering from a heart flutter because (I understand) one of the valves is getting tired.

Now the pulse rate for the average human being is as below.

Children over age 10 and adults 60-100  while for well-conditioned athletes it is 40-60 heart beats per minute.

My recent visit to the Brunel Centre at Southmead for a scan started me thinking. I was more than surprised at the result, — I was absolutely flabbergasted.

Let us suppose that the average for a 50 year old is 60 beats per minute.

Now I will calculate their lifetime. 50 years of 365 days, and you will notice I am counting on the short side in all my reckoning. Is a total of 18,250 days.

24 hours per day makes it 438,000 hours of 60 minutes = 26,280,000 minutes.

Now we find that at 60 beats per minute we have an answer of1,576,800,000 a total that passes all understand. Just Imagine 1,576 MILLION. What a fantastic creation the human body is. And you will observe that I reckoned from the lowest heart rate for an ordinary person and not the average of 80

I understand, and I may well be wrong: that for every 10 lbs over weight (Don’t ask what the metric equivalent is) we have a mile of extra blood vessels in our body. Is it any wonder that the 30 stone and over folk have a shorter life than average? 

Way back in the early 1960's the Clevedon camera club had a couple of trips doing night photography in Bristol.  I had not long before bought myself a Pentax S3 camera with an f1.8 lens. Amazing to me because the lens was so good at wide open shots. When I found a series of negatives while scanning 35 mm monochrome film I discovered that some that had been impossible to print with the enlarger at the time of taking, could be manipulated using the histogram on my 4870 scanner.

I posted a few of them on Morguefile in September of 2013. Last week I found that this one had had over 1,000 downloads in the 15 months it had been on the website.

An average of around 70 downloads a month. I reckon the exposure was about 1/10 to 1/15th of a second at full apperature on Ilford HP3 film. I wish I could hold as well today. That was in the days of my being able to take shots using a 400mm lens hand-held at 1/100th of a second. Thanks to standing and kneeling .22 rifle shooting practice.

Access Database Word-files and Census

Short-cuts when typing census information or lists carrying repetitious information, can save time. Similarly plenty of -useless? - data can be extracted from Access files

Local villages, some with tongue-twisting names that can cause mistyping, and other input can be short-cutted.

[Cgr] Congresbury for example can be used to transform itself into a laboriously long name, using the AutoCorrect options in tools,

[w-i-g] Walton-in-Gordano [ws-i-g] Weston-in-Gordano etc.

[z] can become M [x] S  to speed up key strokes and finger movement when designating if the individual is either married or single.

[stm] changes into Som. [clv] to Clevedon using combinations of letters that do not occur in the normal sequence. All without the brackets placed here to stop alterations in place names etc.

In the same way when using Access by blacking a name or occupation with the mouse, then right-clicking it shows a series of choices. Opting for filter by selection then lists all of the folk working as farm Labourers there in 1871. A total of 30; in using this system it is easy to identify also how many were born locally by moving the mouse to Location,blacking the column with the mouse then right clicking and select Sort ascending.

We then find the listing has been sorted into alphabetic order of places; and that Kenn village is outnumbered by over double the numbers from elsewhere.

Useless information and waste of time? Quite possibly so; but it can still bring up statistics of interest to local historians.

A comparison search for example of both Clapton-in-Gordano and Tickenham villages for the same period shows that whilst there were miners living in Tickenham who worked in the Nailsea coalfields Clapton-in-Gordano had not only miners but engine drivers and firemen plus stokers showing that at that time the coal-field there was still producing in quantity. It will be interesting to see what Nailsea village shows when that census is in turn transcribed.