Following on from last week’s post ‘Census Oddities’, a couple of my queries have been resolved thanks to those kind folk at www.rootschat.com (if you haven’t already discovered this excellent site, I’d recommend you to do so now!):
A ‘Napkin Horse’ appears to have been a small clothes horse (or airer) for airing small items of household linen;
A ‘Singer of Horses’ singed the coat of a horse immediately after it had been clipped, in order to encourage healthy and glossy growth of the coat.
We live and learn…
On Tuesday I went to a talk by Dr Nick Barrett on ‘The Future Of Family History’ – this was very informative and great fun. If you have the chance to hear Nick speak, please seize the opportunity.
Finally, I’ve been busy exploring the website www.lostcousins.com – this site enables you to enter details of everyone in your family tree as shown on the 1841, 1881 and 1911 census returns. You also need to enter the census reference details. If you then hit the ‘search’ button, the site links you with other users who have entered the same details (and therefore must be related to you.)
The advantage of this site is that it matches not just names, but also ages and the census reference. Therefore the matches with someone else’s data is exact.
The site is free to use until you wish to contact another user: at which point you need to take out a subscription. An annual subscription is, at the time of writing this, £10 – the cost of one GRO certificate. It could well be worth it.
The site suggests that the average number of names you need to enter before you find a match is 63. So far I’ve entered 95 names with no match yet, but I’ll keep looking.
Very, very nice page! 🙂