Hi, I'm Chris, and I'd like to welcome you to my little space on the internet.
I'm not the most regular of bloggers, but here's where you'll find my posts about my interest in family history, retro tech, home automation, random little tech projects, or whatever's on my mind at the time.
My day job is running the online shop for one of the UK's largest charities, I'm originally from Reading but now settled in Pembrokeshire.
I recently shared some seaside snaps from my great uncle's photo collection.
I often look at photos and wonder exactly where they were taken, except I don't have the skills of GeoWizard when it comes to geolocating a photo. Instead, I have to live with just using photos from the same batch for context, the few captions that were added to photos, and a little bit of reverse image searching. Or just cheat and use my knowledge, especially when they're photos from my home area.
This has been a bittersweet week. On Thursday I won a directorate award for turning complex data into an impactful narrative about our operations, and yesterday marked 15 years since I started my Cancer Research UK journey.
After my great uncle Jack died in 2021, a whole stash of photographs, negatives and slides were found in various places around his house - even suitcases stashed full of them under a bed.
As the "family archivist", as my dad called me, I was tasked with scanning them all. It was a task that took a couple of months but, 3,200 files, 8.5GB, later, we were able to save and share them with the family.
"What's that got to do with the seaside?!" I hear you ask. Well, going through them revealed an abundance of seaside snaps.
During my most recent rekindling of interest in my family history, I noticed that I didn't have an exact date of birth for my 2x great-grandfather, William Hearn, just a quarter date from the birth indexes of Q1 1840.
I like to get as much detail as possible about my direct ancestors, including copies of BMD certificates where possible, so I immediately thought this was unusual.
I then spotted I'd previously written in the notes:
Prev birth date noted as 3 March 1842. Birth index overrides that - unless there was another William?!
After my great uncle Jack died a few years ago I was given the task of scanning the thousands of photos he and his wife Mary had in their collection.
Read more: Bringing my great uncle's photos to the Fediverse