here in Dorset, England.
Have a look at What's new to get an idea
what's been done so far.
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1911 Census
My long term aim is to add the 1911 Census to the 1841-1901 Censuses already on this website. This involves over 6 months very hard work starting when I shall be 72. It depends obtaining microfilm to work with at home as I have before. It also depends on being alive and sufficiently non-senile to get some 21,000 records into database, indexed, links generated and onto the web.
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DOXEY Family links
Now the Parish Registers and the Census are finished, I can indulge myself in a project I've had in mind for years. DOXEY is my mother's maiden name, rare except around Wirksworth. There are over 1,000 DOXEY records in the Wirksworth PRs, 1,000 in the Census, and 2,000 in the IGI. I'd like to divide them into families, then link the families. Work has already started (see DOXEY Families). The job is open-ended and will probably never be completed. At some stage I want to buy myself a little sketch book and draw the 200+ pedigree trees involved.
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Website Maintenance
The rising number of visitors to this site (500+ per day) means a continuous stream of emails about the Wirksworth website, most of which need answering. Suggestions, possible errors, contributions and even fanmail mean that more time is spent on maintenance and unplanned mini-projects. This seems to be what the future holds. The longer I can keep the site on-line and tightly maintained, the more errors will be weeded out and the more useful will be the site to my readers.
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Unexpected new material
Readers frequently send new material - old photos, pedigrees, newspaper cuttings, articles. If they are about the Wirksworth Area before 1920 I can rarely resist adding them to the website. This can mean quite a lot of work on my part, editing, reformatting, linking, indexing and uploading. The result is like an ever growing scrapbook- between the main sections, you never know what you might find, but my readers seem to like it bless them.
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Ebay derived research
Much recent research by me has been triggered by books, pamphlets and postcards bought on Ebay, that wonderful online auction house. Desirable items appear out of the blue, and my enthusiasm lasts over the process of winning the bid, the postman putting it through the letterbox, scanning and OCRing, looking through many reference books and hand-coding an interesting page which is nice to look at. I'm sure this will continue if I can afford the webspace.
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A View of the Past
Transcription aimed at this website began in June 1995. Three years work on the Parish Registers was put onto the newly born Wirksworth website on 12 July 1998. Since then, a fairly complete list of new data placed on the website can be seen at the What's new page.