So much for freeing up some time and energy. Thanks to my dad, that particular addiction has now been replaced by genealogy once again.
Since he reminded me on Tuesday that the 1911 census has been released, my spare time has been filled with hours of pouring over Mr SID and PDF copies of microfilms. Finally found the specific Toronto house we were looking for but, unfortunately, the people we were hoping to find weren’t living there yet. Dad found a promising entry in St. Gabriel (Montreal) in the 1901 census so he’s going to concentrate on that for the 1911 census. Still, the 1911 census isn’t indexed yet so it’s a matter of slogging through the “microfilms” manually, a long and generally boring process.
To add to the addiction, there’s a site called Automated Genealogy that aims to fully index the 1901 and 1911 censuses (among other things). 1901 is pretty much complete except for the odd correction (I submitted a couple of those myself last night) — the old censuses are really hard to read sometimes both because of the age and condition of the original micofilms and because some of the enumerators had lousy handwriting. 1911 is just in the early stages of indexing and I thought I’d help out with that since I was planning on indexing the Shelburne County pages for the Shelburne County GenWeb site anyway. So now I spend odd bits of spare time transcribing 1911 census pages.
And, oh look at that, my genealogy web sites could use some work. They’ve been badly neglected for the last few years…well, since other hobbies entered my life for the most part.
Anything to avoid what I really should be doing, eh? LOL
