Searching for my next genealogical index, I reviewed the many works which need such an asset, and eventually decided that the two small volumes of the Burgh Court Book of Selkirk, covering the years 1503-1545, merited attention. As these had been published 40 years ago by the Scottish Record Society, I contacted the current Secretary of the society, to gain approval by the society for my proposed index. He was delighted and gave me much encouragement.

Now, it is always worthwhile to have a quick look through the volume you are about to index, and look for possible difficulties or oddities about the work. I discovered that in 1513 there was a list of 160 names constituting the community of Selkirk, and from various indicators (e.g. all males) I decided this was a list of householders in the burgh. There were other later lists (1521,523, 1526) which were clearly stent (local tax) rolls, with amounts attached to each name.
Such lists are among the earliest ever found in UK records, so worth noting. Once I have completed the indexing, I shall need to put together an article about these early lists. The names, for example, are clearly written as sounded by the person saying his name, so that forenames vary considerably - woll/wolle it seems are meant to be Will or Willie, the diminutive of William. Latin is used intermittently, and here can be found with Broad Scots all in one paragraph where the author suddenly switches from Latin to Scots and back again!

Occupations and relationships appear quite often in the text, so that it should be much easier to identify persons, but there is a tendency to fail to mrecord the female spouse's maiden surname ("John Smyth's spouse Bessie"), or even worse, "Bessie Smyth, spouse of John Smyth", as her maiden surname is probably not Smyth. Other instances make clear the maiden surnames of married women, but this inconsistency is annoying, and can be awkward to index effectively. Some names are still in the process of becoming surnames, such as "Stephen of Lawder" sometimes also called "Stephen Lawder". Many instances occur of names appearing in their Latin form, and in such cases I have decided that these should be indexed like seperate names, so that anyone interested in the development of names in Scotland can note such variations.

Other interesting points are the sasines which are recorded, giving details of local pieces of land changing hands. There are many of these, or court cases where there is dispute about land, crops, or possessions, usually with values attached. Inflation is a standard effect today, but back 500 years ago there was little change in prices and valuation of property. I now realise I am getting into what should properly be in an article for publication in a journal, so I shall leave off at this point. Look for the new index in a couple of months!

** I went to update one of the links in KinHelp's Links Section, and found an error message. When I checked with our webmistress, she replied that the database had become corrupted!  This may have happened during the recent transfer of all the KinHelp pages to a new server.

Anyway, she hopes to restore the Links Section at the weekend, using a backup copy of the website, so please wait until next week to use our links.

If you are a US citizen and you discuss genealogy with a Brit, be VERY careful how you use dates in describing ancestral data. If you say an event happened 12-6-1872, you will mean it happened on 6th December 1872, but the Brit will read it as having occurred on 12th June 1872! When I raised the point, I advised using three letters for the month to avoid confusion, preferably in the middle.

I raised it in one of the genealogy newsgroups, and it was well received, but brought up other points from colleagues. One is that Canada and South Africa, at a minimum, have adopted the SI standard of Year-Month-day for official usage, and in South Africa it is mandatory. The Mormons (the LDS), who through their pursuit of ancestors have established certain standards - such as Gedcom - which have been accepted by everyone else, seem to have settled on day of month in numerals/month in 3 letters/ year in numerals, and this is what I use in my own records and software. I am still not sure how this website will end up, as it is dependent on existing US software - Plone. We are looking at the situation.

The number of genealogy software programs have expanded amazingly in number, but all have incorporated in their programming the ability of the user to choose whatever style of date he/she wishes, so we all have the choice available to us. While I would appeal for everyone to use letters for the month, and place it in the middle; and the year in full (as we cover many centuries), you still have the choice of year last or first. Whichever you choose, the date should be clear to everyone and this will eliminate the present confusion that can occur. Have a happy time dating!

The revamping of KinHelp a few months ago involved using an existing piece of software, which unfortunately included "log in" options intended for the website team, but its visibility made users think they had to log in to use the site.

Over the next few weeks we are going to kick things around to improve the site; but one of the improvements we hope to do, is make at least part of the site a "wiki"-style section. This will mean this section is open to you to make contributions and updates to items in it. My intention is that contributions should be small articles (up to 500 words?) on any Scottish genealogy-related subject. There will of course be a webmaster's prerogative to alter or delete any article to keep everything as accurate, readable and to the point as possible. I suspect that will mean any item has to have an author's name and an e-mail contact address; and MUST be original writing, not copied from elsewhere.

I am open to ideas on how we go about this. Articles - pure genealogy, or including place names, geography of Scotland, history of Scotland, clans and tartans, heraldry, and so on? My own preference is to avoid clans, tartans, and heraldry except for brief warning items about the pitfalls in these. I would happily allow warning articles about these unsolicited books "of your family name" which get offered by post and other ways.

Any long article is best dealt with by a link through to a URL where it can be found, possibly on one of your own web pages. That means I cannot amend it, although I would insist on checking its accuracy before allowing a link.

Do you want anything on the origins of some less well known surnames? If so, I would like suggestions on what surnames might be worthwhile elucidating.

Things are hotting up as we get nearer the election date of 3rd May. Claims and counter-claims appear every day, and letters to the local papers push various policy lines, depending on which party the writer favours. Some are from Independent candidates, making their own points, a few are from individual voters, mostly moaning about the candidates!

I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, and I spent Thursday morning delivering leaflets with a couple of other members. We got quite a large area covered, working as a team. Only one person wanted to talk to the local councillor (one of our team), and he was glad to help with the inquiry.
We have borrowed an office in the town centre, above a local betting shop. It has large windows, which are now covered with large yellow posters for the party and its main candidate.

There are two elections happening: One is for the Scottish Parliament, and the other is for local councillors throughout the country - in our case for the Highland Council. The council voting is new, on a proportional representation basis: you mark candidates in order of preference - 1,2,3,...
The Parliamentary voting is different. There you vote once for your preferred candidate, and secondly you place a vote for your preferred political party. The party votes produce Regional MSPs on a proportional basis, supplementing the directly-elected winning candidate. This gives seats to parties which otherwise might have no outright winners. It works fairly well, giving a voice to smaller parties, and more influence for other major parties. It almost inevitably leads to coalition government, but that is good too, as it restricts any extreme policies as coalition partners won't allow these to go ahead.

I found that all day on 15th January I could not access my Kinhelp website. My computer simply stated that the server was not responding. I could access any other website I tried. I eventually sent an e-mail to the webmistress who was at work and didn't get home until late (The server is in her house).

The problem turned out to be that someone (or perhaps a dog, or a ferret - my relations have peculiar preferences in the pet line) had knocked out the power plug, putting the server offline. She just plugged it in again, and told me to wait a few minutes for it to get back to full operation, and Hey Presto!- KinHelp was back in full view. Just shows how much we are dependent on simple things happening....

A couple of days later, we had another problem of a similar nature, and this time it related to my ISP's changing of settings, which clashed with our server's settings, and the router objected to this treatment. The webmistress has been planning to upgrade to a newer server, more able to cope with the vagaries that can beset us, so I have sent a financial input towards speeding that up. It could do with it, as the router was playing up again on 24th January, till my grandson reset it after school.

Hopefully this will mean that KinHelp's website will be more consistently reliable, and possibly even faster in response - but I don't understand the technicalities.....