Timothy Lawn 1718 - 1776

The St Stithians parish records are available on the FamilySearch website and the page here records Timothy's burial and notes he was an 'out pensioner' of Chelsea Hospital. Chelsea Hospital is very well known in the UK and to this day provides a home for Chelsea Pensioners, ex-service personal who after long service retire to a residential home and dress in a very well recognised red uniform. What is less well known is that the majority of pensioners live outside the residential establishment. More information on Chelsea Hospital and it's pensioner residents today can be found here. 

The process for qualification for a pension, and I believe the only criteria for discharge from service, were a medical inspection with results being recorded in a register. The original registers are maintained at the UK National Archives, have been microfilmed and are available for download - but as yet not available for searching on-line. The entry for Timothy Lawn is available as WO116/5 image 344, it shows he was medically examined on 20th September 1763 and found to be 'worn out' and granted a pension. It further details that he was forty-five years old and had completed 20 years of military service at that stage, was born in Northallerton in Yorkshire and gives his pre-military occupation as a weaver. 

Further research at The National Archives established that he served with the East Yorkshire Regiment later changing its name to 15th Foot Regiment whose main base is at Catterick, Yorkshire, just near Northallerton. See here for a short regimental history. The East Yorkshire regiment were known to be actively recruiting in Cornwall at the time of Timothy's marriage in 1747 / 1748. Timothy and Anne's marriage in Penryn is recorded in the St Gluvius parish register here which records the date as 22 February 1747 but as this pre-dates the calendar change in 1752 according to the 'new' calendar the date would be one year later. The record is annotated with the word 'soldier' adding confidence that we have the 'right' Timothy Lawn. It is probable that Anne would have accompanied her husband on active service as a 'camp follower'.

The  East Yorkshire  Regiment saw service in a number of European actions as well as fighting in Canada where there is mention of Timothy's participation on Roll Calls again preserved in the UK National Archives.

On the basis that Timothy is a very unusual forename in 18th century England I'm tempted to speculate that either he or his father may have joined the East Yorkshire as a mercenary from Europe possibly from the Flemish part of Belgium where weaving would have been the predominant occupation at that time.

About my genealogy

When autumn leaves fall they build layers beneath the tree,  eventually lower layers lose form and shape until only skeletons remain.  It's the natural process, it's organic, an analogy to human life. Like the leaves,  just a little evidence of the person remains – a Roman tile, a coin, a clay pipe from Shakespeare's time, a document, all left in place, waiting. Nothing we re-discover should be seen just as an object, everything we find belonged to a person who lived, and loved, and looked out at the sky each day.  We must remember that what we see and handle is a compression of their life and realise we've just opened one of the millions of windows into the ground.

I recently found a series of blog posts by Tonia Kendrick from 2011 discussing a 31 step programme which I'm following for development of a blog with the aim of increasing traffic several fold. The first link in the chain is the development of an 'elevator pitch' a short statement (recommended to be less than 150 words) that could be delivered to a stranger in the duration of an elevator ride to summarise the ethos behind the blog. My elevator pitch is the opening paragraph of this post and is loosely based on a passage from the final chapter of 'London' (Rutherfurd, 1998) which so appropriately sums up why I'm so passionate about this subject and explains why the concepts voiced struck such a powerful chord.

From the first, faltering steps, back in 1990's New Zealand regular trips to the local Family History Centre on Thursday evenings to consult a recently arrived reel of microfilm, ordered weeks earlier, that just might contain a reference to an ancestor who was the current focus of research. Saturday trips to the Library of New Zealand to consult immigrant ships manifests and voyage reports – all this added to the intense satisfaction of conducting a
forensic investigation into the infinite number of life changing events of people whose only connection is a common ancestry. I soon came to realise, that I was 'hooked', just as securely as any fish pursued by a skilful fly-fisherman.

In the 'Noughties' I established a web site using the ''thedobsons' domain but it became apparent that research into the 'Dobson' name represented only the very small tip of a very large iceberg – and now less than 1% of the individuals included in my tree have the last name Dobson. I was confronted by an enigma, people looking for Dobson references who consulted my online records would almost certainly be disappointed in the relative lack of relevant data to be found here and people interested in the name Switalla and its Polish origins would have no reason to consult a site whose name indicates that it is about a family with its roots firmly in England.

The solution I opted for was the establishment of the My Rellies web presence to hold my modest collection of records, plus some 'other stuff' I'm working on. By associating the names from the tree to this new site using various information linking resources like Cyndi's List, Genes Reunited and Ancestry and using a collaborative, open source genealogy tool webtrees, I am building on my research base and aim to provide resources to fellow researchers.

Rutherfurd, E. London. Arrow Books, pp.1298-1299

Web site refresh

After retiring from full-time employment earlier this year and successfully completing a computer programming training course at the O'Reilly School of Technology I've decided to pick up my genealogy research where I left off a couple of years ago. This 'kills several birds with one stone', it means I can use my technical writing skills to communicate via this blog, it means I can put my web design skills to use developing, maintaining and operating the MyRellies.com website whilst at the same time continuing my personal research and adding data to the archive.

As part of this re-focus of activity I decided to refresh the web site which is beginning to show its age, wasn't delivering on its design goals and which could well do with some of my relatively recently learned design skills courtesy of The Open University.

In 2008 when the site was developed three original design goals were:

• To promote the genealogy project and recruit volunteers to contribute time and effort
• An entry point for the webtrees application
• An entry point for the 'Rellie Finder' - data-grid application.

Performance against the first design goal was disastrous, in two years not a single volunteer was recruited. The second and third goals are only required if the first is successfully achieved. Webtrees is designed to act as it's own entry point and promotion of use of the data-grid is not a primary purpose of the exercise.

In 2013 / 2014 it is time to implement a site to better meet those goals with an appreciation of two further issues:

• Genealogists generally don't like to let data out of their direct control and let it be hosted by other people.
• There is a general dis-trust in putting data up on Internet, the fear is that it will be compromised or downloaded and sold.

I intend to return to these issues in later blog articles when the subjects of succession planning and collaborative projects are addressed

Warning - the following text is technical IT 'speak' and as such may cause damage to health

I thought it was worthwhile sharing some of the technical issues that have arisen and the conclusions reached. The new site is not yet completed as I write this, but sufficient is in place to describe what will be live over the next few days.

The original site was fairly conventional – a simple horizontal menu near the top of each page with four, single level options and four more links laid out as vertical blocks down the right-hand side. Terms of use, contact details and a privacy policy appeared at the bottom of each page with the area between header and footer left for variable amounts of text. There was no attempt to limit the amount of text on an individual page meaning that a users had to scroll to access hidden text and the footer. The site predated both the HTML5 and CSS movements and it delivered static information, but used Javascript to generate Google Analytics. The 'engine' of the site was a single page which acted as a customised entry point to the webtrees genealogy package and also as an entry point to a to a PHP driven data-grid of BMD records I had transcribed.

I decided that the menu system was inappropriate, and overkill for a very small site with four pages and a few hyperlinks, that had little or no potential to grow and wasn't likely to experience high traffic levels. I figured that the menu's could be replaced by standalone buttons and the hyperlinks rationalised to provide a rudimentary help system.

In the medium term I plan to stop using Google Analytics to record traffic, rather to use post-processing of the raw logs maintained by my hosting provider. This means I can strip all the Javascript code out of my pages and avoid the tracking and third party cookie issues which be-devil my privacy policies. I personally believe that Javascript will go the same way as Adobe Flash, in a similar timescale, but development of that argument is for another day.

I looked at a couple of responsive design frameworks – Bootstrap 3 from Twitter and Foundation from Zurb and whilst they have attractions their prime focus is on mobile and cross platform development and the 'code bloat' and steep learning curve they both bring is not a good trade-off in my position. In fact I've gone away from Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 as my web coding tool of preference, again I think it is overkill for a small site – I've hand-crafted the code using the Sublime 3 text editor from Sublime Pty and the good old Chrome browser

Undoubtably the most contentious decision (and one I could end up regretting, and having to do an 'about face' ) has been to adopt an HTML5 / CSS3 only coding standard without degraded support for non-compliant browsers.  I can't imagine there are many people out there, even genealogists, still browsing on Microsoft XP - but I guess I'm about to find out !!

A RootsTech Perspective

Introduction

For people of 'a certain age' blogging is not a natural way to disseminate or promote a personal view, but given the encouragement to participate in Web 2.0 and share the way most of the rest of the planet seems to want to 'tell all' I figured I'd take advantage of  the medium.

The snow is falling as I write, which I guess is fairly appropriate as what I want to talk about is the RootsTech Conference in Salt Lake City, just down the road from Park City which is arguably the centre of the Winter Sports industry in the US. Firstly, let me award a big bouquet to the conference organisers for providing the facilities  to stream a selection of presentations 'live' to The Internet, mostly it worked just fine when I worked out that the environment was optimised for Internet Explorer on a Windows PC, not Safari on an iMac or the standard browser on an Android tablet.

The experience of virtually participating at a conference event was novel, the feeling of being the target of received wisdom without being able to either ask questions or network with other attendees to gauge their perceptions of concepts presented left the feeling of opportunities missed – hence this blog, to air some idea's and reactions. I think the keynote on the first morning was thought provoking in the extreme, the stark realisation of the impermanence of media and format, illustrated by the demise of the floppy disk should be a wake-up call to all of us.

Succession planning

 A view of 2060 was the focus of Jay Verkler keynote presentation on the first day, he proposed the view that genealogists of that era will be eternally grateful for our rigorous efforts to portray the century that preceded ours.

I disagree with him and think that genealogists in 2060 will be disappointed that we failed to take advantage of the options with which we were presented. I think we should concentrate attention to succession planning and persistence of research and data. I fear that too many times records are thrown out or a password protected computer is permanently switched off after a person dies, abandoning possibly unique insights into the past.

Publication and collaboration

The resolution of the case for Web publication of research results is a personal decision for each genealogist, for the 'records in a shoe box' or the compiler of Excel spreadsheets there is probably no alternative – their records will remain forever private, presumably thats what they feel comfortable with. The genealogist who consigns the totality of their records to 'The Cloud' and embraces the collaborative approach, without a desktop 'master copy' represents the other end of the spectrum.


In the middle are the current majority of genealogists who insist on maintaining a 'master' version of their records on their PC but seek the kudos and collaborative possibilities of Internet publishing and online updating always providing that any changes can be synchronised back to the 'master' copy. In my opinion these people are going to have to 'wake up and smell the coffee', automatic synchronisation in this sense is never going to happen – its not technically possible or I would argue, desirable, synchronisation is and will remain a manual exercise fraught with problems. With a rigorous unattended backup regime in place which regularly emails a copy of the database backup, not just a GEDCOM, genealogists should trust 'The Cloud' – it has a much greater up-time than a local PC.

There are issues with collaboration which require some thought, how are disputes resolved, the ownership of data or media and the responsibility for learning how to use the chosen software need to be agreed and spelled out – responsibilities as well as rights.

Image recognition

As part of the Ancestry keynote panel discussion on Saturday the participants were invited to speculate about the most wide ranging technological advance they expected to see in the next ten years. Search technology was mentioned with advances predicted in the specific area of the use of semantics based around the new HTML 5 micro-code standard which will allow the extraction of genealogically significant names and events from appropriately marked up text streams. DNA developments featured in several speculative assessments but nobody mentioned developments in image / face recognition. I believe it will be possible quite soon, if it isn't already, for software to 'learn' the specifics of  a facial image and identify that individual in hitherto unattributed images.

Search technology

Robert Gardner from Google introduced the topic of search engine optimisation as related to genealogy and whilst his talk may have acted as an introduction to the subject he presented little of substance to existing web site owners already familiar with the topic.


Have you ever wondered why search engines don't return a large number of hits from Ancestry, Find My Past or Family Search when you query a name, its because of the 'pay wall' of the professional sites that stop the crawlers dead in their tracks and prevents them harvesting data to index. Similarly, login forms, in use in so many amateur sites have the same effect and the only way around this is to generate XML site-maps which can be dynamically updated to accommodate changes of content.


Almost as a 'throw away' he offered a search tip for genealogists generally, which for me was one of the highlights of RootsTech. When using a search engine to look for records related to an individual one should preface the search argument with '~genealogy' which aims to limit the result set to those that are genealogy significant, its not perfect but it helps to eliminate grass seed resellers if you're looking for Thomas LAWN. Indeed, I've already discovered a transcribed Polish marriage reference buried in a 2007 news group archive which would normally been lost on page 78 of the search results.