Hello, everyone. I am new at this game, so bear with me a little....

My website has been revamped by my daughter's partner, for which I am very grateful (except it now means that I have to do all the alterations)!

New on the website is another index, this time to a book on charters, etc. of Dundee. I am now working on a book covering early charters up to the Reformation, and thereafter Kirk session records of Perth, and there is a lot of detail on ordinary people included.

I have updated my wife Kay's page, which has some detail of the horrendous trials she went through. For myself, it was very worrying, and I spent nearly six months visiting her in hospital twice a day to sit by her side - and for much of the time she was either comatose or not very with it at all. Despite the slow but steady improvements, she is still registered disabled, so at least we have a blue badge entitling her to park with impunity in most places.

My son Tom and his wife Audra have two little girls - 7 and 4, and are very happy together. Tom is very proud of his daughters and dotes on them.

My daughter's son, Kieran, is now 14 and almost as tall as I am, and about the same weight. He is a clever lad, but obstreperous, diffident at times, and extremely knowledgeable - knows more about computers than I do (not difficult!). He is a wonderful grandson, though.

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.....

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.

** 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.