I visited Glasgow earlier this week for the preview screening of a new BBC documentary series, Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth. The series will be broadcast on BBC 2 Scotland in April and on BBC 4 nationwide later this year. 

One of the BBC team described the series as Who Do You Think You Are for ships and, judging by the preview screening, I think that's a pretty accurate description. The episode shown was about the cable repair ship CS Mackay-Bennett and her role in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster. It combined fascinating information about the ship with gripping human interest stories, all set in the wider context of the communications revolution brought about by the laying of undersea cables.

The first episode will be about the Cutty Sark and I spent several months last year doing research for the BBC into various members of her crew. I was then asked to take part in the programme to present some of my findings. This involved being interviewed by the lovely series presenter - the distinguished Scottish actor David Hayman - in the splendid surroundings of the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. 

The programme will feature new information which I have uncovered about the Cutty Sark's notorious "hellship voyage" and will, I hope, lead to a more balanced view of one of the key people involved. I will be able to write more about this once the programme has aired, so watch this space!

Last year I was privileged to be commissioned to trace descendants of the crews of the Cutty Sark. I got the chance to see the Conservation Project up close and was so impressed by the quality of the restoration work and the imaginative curation and interpretation. I know the descendants whom we brought together on the ship felt the same way. 

Now the Cutty Sark has reached the finals of the National Lottery Awards 2013. The Awards are an annual search to find the UK’s favourite Lottery-funded projects, and they aim to celebrate and recognise the difference that those projects have made to people, places and communities all across the UK. 

The Cutty Sark is competing against six other projects for the title of Best Heritage Project and would be a very worthy winner. If you agree, please vote here.

My Research Toolbox has now grown too large to fit on one page! I've divided it into separate pages for each category, with access via an index page. The screenshot above shows the page for the House History category, with links to a variety of research guides covering national and local archives.

The Toolbox contains links to websites I have found useful in my own research. It reflects my personal and professional research interests and doesn't pretend to be comprehensive. If you don't find what you're looking for there, please try Cyndi's List.

Happy researching!

This morning I spoke to the Thornbury U3A Family History Group on the subject "Descendants of Cutty Sark - Tracing Living People". They were a great audience, as ever, and asked some excellent questions about sources for tracing living people. I shared with them my personal research toolbox of links. It should keep them all busy researching for a while! Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of my favourite websites for tracing living people here on this blog.

Yesterday I received a nice compliment about the design of my new Sodbury Genealogy website. I'd been feeling discontented with the old monochrome theme of this website and was also very conscious that the content needed updating. So I decided to do a makeover, using the same Weebly theme I've used for  Sodbury Genealogy but with a different image header. The image I've chosen is a postcard I own, showing Coupar Angus, Perthshire in Edwardian times. I blogged about the postcard last year in Postcard from the Past. My aim was to give the two sites the feeling of "coming from the same stable", whilst being visually distinct from each other.

I've added lots of new content to the site, the main addition being a page devoted to my research into the crews of Cutty Sark. I've also added a page explaining my terms of business, covering topics such as ethics, the research agreement, copyright, payment and being prepared for research to turn up unexpected results! This last item was included following a discussion on the APG mailing list which showed that several of us have had to break bad news to clients about their ancestors. Harold Henderson of Midwest Roots reminded us that we are advised to raise this general issue with clients before starting a research project, so I've added a section to this website.

I hope you like the new layout and content. Please comment on this post to let me know what you think.

I've been working on a project for a client involving research into a group of unrelated but historically connected people. Quite a few of these people appear in online family trees. 

AFTER I did my research on each person I checked out the online trees to see if I had missed anything. I was staggered by the very high degree of inaccuracy I found. I estimate over 90% of the trees had incorrect data for basic birth, marriage and death facts. Given that these people were unrelated, this was not just one "family historian" posting misinformation but many separate individuals. 

On the plus side, 1% of the online trees led to gold dust such as family photographs or digital images of primary source material.