Just a quick note for anyone with Non-Conformist ancestors, FindMyPast have now added Non-Conformist baptism, marriage and burial records to their collections.

[Note: All content on the Hibbitt & Barnes Family History website and blog is copyrighted. Click here for conditions of use.]

Thousands of historical newspaper pages are added to The British Newspaper Archive every week, so the coverage keeps getting better and better.

In the last month, 240,000 extra pages from 1790-1954 were made searchable. 56 English and Scottish newspaper titles were updated, including the Aberdeen Journal, the Kent & Sussex Courier and the Morpeth Herald.

The additions also included three brand new titles:

• Dundee, Perth and Forfar People’s Journal, covering 1858-1861.
• Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, covering 1913, 1915 and 1924.
• Penny Illustrated Paper, covering 1862-1870.

You'll find more information and a full list of recent additions here.

[Note: All content on the Hibbitt & Barnes Family History website and blog is copyrighted. Click here for conditions of use.]

Hibbitt Family Tree section - Surnames: Ball, Dearing, Edwards, Riccard, Bowden, Wilkins, Sanders

I've been investigating the ancestors of Israel Edward Ball and Ann Dearing, in addition to adding further details for this couple.

Israel and Ann were due to be married in 1838 when Ann was pregnant with daughter, Maria. Banns were read in February but, for some reason, the wedding didn't happen at this time. Perhaps the baby was early - Maria was baptized on 22nd April - but we can never be certain of the reason for the delayed nuptials.

When Ann was pregnant with their daughter, Mary, banns of marriage were once again called and Israel and Ann married in Okehampton on 2nd August 1840. Mary was baptized three months later. Sadly, Mary died in 1842 and a son, William, arrived in about 1845.

Tragedy struck again in 1847 when Ann died in February and then Israel in August. Two weeks later, little William was buried. A note in the burial register mentions that Israel was buried by order of the Coroner. I haven't yet established the cause of death but there doesn't seem to be anything in the newspapers so I imagine the coroner may have become involved if he died alone......Read more »

Hibbitt Family Tree section

Since FindMyPast recently added a lot more Devon parish records, I thought I'd do some further investigation into my maternal line. I've therefore added the parents of my 3 x great-grandmother, Mary Jane Moore:

• They were John Moore & Sally Alford. Mary Jane was one of thirteen children.
• It seems John was illegitimate. His mother was Mary Moore.
• Sally's parents were James Alford & Catherine Bellew and she had a younger brother and sister.

Place names: Beaford, Shebbear, Buckland Filleigh, Westleigh, Great Torrington, all in North Devon.

Turning to my paternal line, I have now added the parents and siblings of Robert Stuart King:

• His parents were Walker King & Juliana Stuart. Robert was the youngest of nine children.

Place names: Stone near Dartford, Leigh on Sea in Essex, Bath and Cossington in Somerset.

Both the King and Stuart lines are interesting families. More to come later. They are related to me through the marriage of Ruby Dando (my great-grandfather's half sister) who was married to Robert.

[Note: All content on the Hibbitt & Barnes Family History website and blog is copyrighted. Click here for conditions of use.]

Regular followers of my blog will notice I haven't been posting very much in recent months. This is because I've been upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 Pro. First of all, I borrowed a Windows 7 PC to see just what software would and wouldn't work and after a few weeks of testing, I had my new PC built.

Leaving Outlook Express behind in favour of Mozilla Thunderbird was a culture-shock - I've heavily customised the program to look as close to OE as I could get.

I also hate the so-called ClearType (it should be called fuzzy-type) which Microsoft force on to their users and so I have removed this as far as possible. However, there isn't a way that I could find to get rid of it in Internet Explorer and so I've switched to Mozilla Firefox as my main browser.

I missed my XP start menu and so I installed the wonderful Classic Shell program - incidentally, a must-have for Windows 8 users in my opinion.

My web design program had to be updated too, as well as many more programs and some I've had to resign to the bin as they no longer work on Windows 7.

All this and then I finally had to look at my family tree software. Having tried Legacy, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker 2014, Ancestral Quest and Family Historian, I hit a snag with every one of them. Some were too complicated for my liking but my main issue was after exporting a GEDCOM file to run through the program which generates my family web pages, I found facts listed in the wrong order and even children and wives in the wrong order too.

I eventually settled on resorting to my old and trusty Family Tree Maker 2006 program, but not before having to download a patch file first. I'm aware that reports can't be exported to PDF documents on a 64 bit machine. Although there is a work-around by using a third party program such as PDF995, this doesn't allow for single page outputs of charts. I shall probably have to export a GEDCOM and import it into FTM 2014 and produce the chart from there. I'm not so keen on the chart layouts in the 2014 program and it's more bother than before.

And so, in the name of progress, I feel Microsoft have put me through the ringer somewhat without me gaining anything, other than an operating system which will hopefully be supported for some time to come.