Author Archives: admin

Orders of Merit, Mary, Barbara and Hamish

Today, after yesterday’s resurrection of the Dixon-Spain site, I’ve added the order of Merit awarded to the Rev. Thomas in 1923, the names and birthdates of Ted’s two girls (Mary and Barbara) as well as Hamish, Bridget and Ian’s son — who Dad tells me is still alive.

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The Genealogy Obsession

Just a quick note to say that this research is acting like a drug. The more you do it the more you want to do it. Even infinitessimal progress feels like a breakthough. Just confirming a date of birth feels epochal. And adding a new name to the tree is extraordinary — I find myself [...]

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Google Books and Familial Research

Working my way through all the research possibilities that the net offers for free has been an interesting experience. Refining and re-refining searches has been rewarding, if in a limited way. Actually I say that, and the Heckington Spaynes came out of a Google search, as did the marriages of Spains in Lincoln and the [...]

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Spains, Spaynes and Plagues

To record or not to record, that is the genealogical question. I’ve just updated the website, making two major leaps of faith to fill in the family in the early to mid-nineteenth century. With only the knowledge that the Rev. Thomas was born in Lincoln, I searched for his father Thomas and came up with [...]

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A bug in WPMU creating pages?

Mild mannered genealogical janitor by day, but by night bug-ridden, page overwriting fuey? Could Be! A frustrating half an hour with WPMU overwriting the same page with material for three pages sequentially. I didn’t catch on to begin with having been fooled by Firefox shift-refresh thing, but then I changed to safari, which created a [...]

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The Wives of the Reverend Thomas Dixon-Spain

With the help of David Secker I have been piecing together the marital arrangements on the Reverend Thomas. It seems he married Elizabeth Showler first, and with her had two children, Lizzie and Thomas. The latter, according to family legend, was the black sheep of the family and went away to Ohio having dallied with [...]

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Ted’s Service Record Now Uploaded

Two sheets of A3 came through the post a few months ago, and I have just scanned them in and put them up on JEDS’s page. Confirmed his time and place of death, his marriage, and Elsie’s surname as well his decorations and postings. Incredibly active career — particularly that bit in WW2 during the [...]

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Testing new theme

Working on making the family tree display well with twitter-ish theme called Tworrder (Go figure!). Really configurable and ideal for an installation of WPMU and BuddyPress. And actually, this post is to confirm the sidebar is working.

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