Book Review: Seven Ages of Britain by Justin Pollard

This is an important book for me because it's the first history book I read because I chose to. I was never interested in history, I wasn't keen on the way it was presented in school and didn't choose it as a GCSE subject. I think what changed for me was that I became interested in history the year I met my wife, Lucy. I lived in North Lincolnshire where not a lot has happened, but Lucy lived in Wiltshire, where things have been happening that are nationally and internationally important for thousands of years.

So, when I saw the television series featured a fair bit of history around Wiltshire, I started watching it. Since then, I've been interested in history and pre-history and because this book focuses on 'ordinary' people; I think it was a precursor to my initial interest in family history.

The Ancestor Effect: Thinking about your ancestors will make you more intelligent

A few years ago, Peter Fischer et al, conducted research into whether intellectual performance could actually be increased by thinking about one's genetic origin.

They noted that a lot of research had been conducted asking people to look the end of their own lives. So, with that in mind, they decided to go the other way and formulated a series of 4 studies asking participants to think about their ancestors.

They posited that thinking about ones ancestors, whether concrete (ancestors that they had met) or abstract (ancestors they hadn't met, for example in the 15th century), would increase the participants expected performance (how well they thought they'd do) and their actual performance on tasks completed as part of the study.

Web Resources: FreeBMD

FreeBMD is a website populated with Birth, Marriage, and Death records transcribed by volunteers FreeUKGenealogy project, which includes FreeCEN and FreeReg. As FreeBMD is the one that I frequently use, I'm going to concentrate on this part of the project.
and available for free to the public. It's part of the

This website is fantastic in its own right, but especially so if you don't have access to other sites such as Ancestry. BMD records between 1837-1983 are available, however the transcription is ongoing and not every record is available as yet. However, transcriptions are added regularly with November 2014 seeing 806,328 new records added increasing the amount of records to 308,090,800.

Family Tabletop Games

I've always enjoyed tabletop games, mainly playing different board games. For the past few years, the tile-placement game, Carcassonne, has been our game of choice due to the mechanic of picking tiles blind out of a bag, which provides a randomness that keeps the game interesting - and, of course, the many expansions that provides a wide range of extra tiles and features.

Carcasonne has been played by three generations of my family; myself, my mum and my niece. However, there is a game that has been played by at least five generations of my family over many decades. The game is called veertigen, veertigleggen or the name favoured by my family: Jokeren.