but it did mean we finally finished the housework and sorted out lots of gardening (it’s a tough life being your own boss). The weather will hopefully hold off for a while longer in which case I can finally put up the Sax Kohte for what I hope will be its last prototyping session. I think we’ve got a new cross piece sorted that can take the strain and a method of creating it that means we can use off the shelf parts for 95% of the Kohte making it easier for people to either expand their Kohte or source stuff from wherever they want (except the special bits, for them you’ll have to flutter your eyelashes at me). In fact, i might just make myself a cuppa and go and give it a go.

Otherwise we’re gearing up for ZDL (if Wyvern ever make a bloody decision on what they want) and even starting to pack for Drachenfest despite it being two months away. We’re going to try and avoid the last minute panic by packing all the main tents next week. This will also allow us to do a total stock check and see what smaller tents we have available to satisfy The Grand Expedition’s requirements and get in/make any ropes, pegs etc that we may be short of. It will also allow us to decide if building a super temple is possible given the current demands on our supply of tentage and if we require more than one 7.5 tonne lorry.

Both the Jurte’s I left in the UK are in use this weekend at two events being hosted by Seedling Productions and I’m looking forwards to seeing the results. I’ll be honest and say what I’m most looking forwards to is not having a panicked Alex on the phone but she’s a resourceful woman so I doubt it.

Finally, if the weather holds off, it will be Ranger repairs this weekend. I’ll be able to lay them out in the garden, fix the meshes and pack them away ready to go on ebay and be sold off. So if you are umming and ahhing about a nice 5m bell tent with high sides good for all year round camping or even as a group tent, then get in touch quick or you’ll have to pay full whack rather than getting over a 30% discount.

The pic by the way is of a customer’s Ranger that he lives in all year round and has stood up to everything thrown at it for the last year which should give you an idea of how tough and long lasting these tents are – and at £500 they’re a bargain.

Right, back to the grindstone although the sun is shining, the kettle is boiling and there’s an interesting thread about monstering on the CP facebook page so maybe not straight away.

After breakdown in the rain – not impressed – I legged it up to Root n Branch Acres, home of Seedling Productions, to make use of one of their sites to dry the tents (on the one sunny day we had that week) and to train Alex in how to put up the Jurtes. This was important because 2 of them have stayed in the UK to be used at their sites for LARP events. This also means that their are 2 Jurtes (a 6m and an 8m) floating about that could be rented from Seedling productions for your events too – just not from the middle of July to the middle of August when they’re in use at Drachnfest and Conquest. Contact Alex (contact details on the Root n Branch site) to discuss your requirements. If you’re a small LARP system then contact Alex anyway as their sites are excellent and central.

The plan after that was to repair Ranger bell tents but the weather kind of wiped that out so I’ve had to bring them all back to Germany where we have the space to do that indoors (luckily we have the space as the weather is rubbish today!). We’ve sold quite a few of these but there are some left if you’re after a bargain all-season heavy duty modern cotton bell tent with high sides. Once I have finished the repairs they’ll be e-bayed and I don’t expect them to be around after that.

And then it was back to the UK which turned into an epic road trip. I started about 10am with a mad dash back to Root n Branch acres to collect all my tools and then, thanks to idiot drivers who can’t see lorries and hit them, a detour followed by the trek to Dover and then back to Germany getting home at 5am Saturday morning totally knackered. I took the weekend off. Sort of. Next couple of trips are to a LARP event in Germany at the end of the month probably followed by ZDL (Wyvern’s small event of about 800-1000 players). I’ll try and take lots of pics of wimpy beggar Orcs for you.

Having just completed what can only be described as a vast amount of filing for my family (over 130 people needed to be indexed and filed) it occurred to me to question who exactly I was filing and if they were really family. Genealogists trace bloodlines but all the websites throw up any record that matches anyone in your tree and, if there’s lots of records, you tend to follow that particular trail which usually results in ending up 2 or 3 marriages away from where you first started and actually exploring and recording bits of family that aren’t. Or rather, are only vaguely related via marriage or marriages. This does lead to a rapid expansion of your tree and the illusion that you’re getting somewhere in your research – after all, your tree is growing – but in reality, as I have just realised, you’re actually traipsing through someone else’s tree rather than spending time attending to your own.

So, the question is: how to stop yourself from wandering off following a trail you shouldn’t be on?

The new system I use for indexing (see last post) needs another modification to record the relationship of either parent to the people listed i.e. In the royal tree (see pic), Caroline Leary’s family would generate its own sheet which should state – probably at the top – that this is my fathers family, and the relationship is Grandparent. You can then assume that all descendants are Aunts, Uncles etc. and their descendants will be cousins of one form or another. For any family of a woman who marries into the direct line the relationship could be listed as ‘by marriage to xxxx’ or even ‘ by marriage to xxxx who married yyyy’ where yyyy is a direct ascendant. In this way you could quickly see if the bit of family you’re busy chasing through history is actually a proper bit of family and not a false trail you’re being led down by the availability of records of one sort or another.

I’ll have to create a new version of my index form and upload it at some point soon.

In case you’re wondering (like anyone has made it this far in reading this!), writing these types of entry helps me clarify my thinking and move myself forwards with maintaining a grip on my family tree as it threatens to sprawl out of control. If they’re useful to you, great! If not, stop reading them!

For the last few months I’ve been playing with the concept of a Saxon style kohte. The Saxon style tent is quite popular amongst medieval market traders over here in Germany and seeing them at Hoenerfest got me thinking – could you make one out of a standard Kohte and some Jurte panels?

This idea sat in my head for a few weeks and then we tried it out at Drachenfest 2011 as, let’s be totally honest here, a lashup courtesy of myself and Truffel (pronounced Truffle cos he is one – sweet and expensive). It worked. The concept was proven and, even though it didn’t quite look right, the idea was sound. Success! Yay! Onto the shelf it went.

Until now.

Bloody Inga only went and sold one!

Without it having actually moved from concept usable by ‘tent people’ to product usable by anyone. What was she thinking???

So now I’m faced with the prospect of having to finalise and test the design in, what can only be described as, a somewhat shortened timescale (my normal timescales are something along the line of ‘yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it at some point…’) so it can be delivered to the customer and then made available for general sale. I suppose I should be grateful to Inga as the pressure and looming deadline has actually made me do some testing.

There are two main problems with this design being made from Kohte panels and Jurte roof inserts; the cross piece and the cap. Now, we could just simply manufacture new pieces and whack an exorbitant price tag on but that is never a solution that sits well with us as a company. Most people may already own a Kohte and to not re-use every part of that seems, well, untidy at the least. So the problem is how do you get from Kohte to Sax Kohte by only adding bits to what you already own?

The cap solution has turned out to be quite simple; Oval roof cap (can’t believe I own one of these and haven’t yet photographed it – duh!), quick bit of sewing to seal one side and two new eyelets. Done.

But this does introduce a new problem; the oval roof cap is slightly too long and hangs on the side panels so the middle poles will need to be a tad longer to enable it to sit properly. We could go with new poles (bad solution) or some form of slot-on extension which is more of a possibility.

The cross piece is the bigger problem.

Prototype 1 was some bits of wood lashed together and the ends of the tent sagged. Badly.

Prototype 2 performed superbly and was neat. And graceful. And then snapped under the strain.

Prototype 3 performed brilliantly too but, as you can see, is not likely to stand up to sustained use or much else.

The problem with the cross piece is the length. It needs to be 270cm long, at least. so a single pole or baton is out of the question. And it needs to take quite a bit of strain – especially if it’s being hauled up using the lashing ropes (which was how prototype 2 snapped).

So next it’s off to the workshop to see the tent guru (Inga’s dad) to discuss maybe using a third centre pole with an extension instead. If that works then all we need to manufacture is the extensions and everything else is off the shelf. Now that would be a result.

Price for this lovely construction is almost certainly going to exceed £1000 but you do get a two complete tents in one ( a Kohte and a Sax Kohte) all in a tent that can be backpacked and have a fire inside with an estimated lifespan of 30 years or more. So cost is high but value for money is excellent. This would make an excellent tent for anyone involved in LARP or even scouts who want more room than a Kohte can offer but still want the incredible versatility that they represent. Drop me a message via facebook or via the website if you’re interested.

Hopefully we’ll have the new cross piece before the end of the week and we’ll be able to put this into production soon after.

Follow The Cotton Tent Company on facebook if you want to keep up with everything we’re doing. Once I’ve completed this one I may well look at creating more historical style tents using off the shelf parts. Just because I can.

This old 6m Jurte roof has been pegged out in the garden as you can see. What you can’t see is the ever so slightly tiny itsy bitsy I hesitate to mention it cos it’s so small and insignificant hole in the roof. Not the one that’s meant to be there for the smoke to come out of but the other one. And the rip but that’s nothing. That said I shall now mention how good the manufacture of these roofs is. I pegged this out just before the weekend in the sure and certain knowledge that the weather was going to be pretty rubbish over the weekend (I wanted to do some gardening so rain and wind was bound to arrive) and it has sat there being rained on and blown about – you’ll notice the centre isn’t even secured – and two things have happened; first, it’s clean again – nothing like lots of rain to get rid of the dirt and, second, it isn’t any more damaged than when it first went up despite being under tension and despite shrinking and expanding in the weather. And this roof is a good 30 years old. Quality German manufacture. None of your cheap good for 2 or 3 years if you’re lucky rubbish here.

So now, once it’s dry, it’s off to the workshop to be repaired and re-patched and voila! Another roof to use at LARP events and probably sell to the Orcs afterwards.

Now all I need to do is sort through all the old panels and see if any of them can be rescued/resurrected and that’s even less new bits to buy.

If you’re interested in a second hand (possibly third or fourth hand!) 6 or 8m Jurte then do let either me or Inga know and maybe we can make a deal

In the meantime please tell everyone about us and to like us on facebook (The Cotton Tent Company) and then you’ll be sure of a warm welcome at Drachenfest if you’re going (if not, why not? It’s EPIC!). See you there!

We arrived at Root n Branch to be met by a huge pile of tents that had turned up from the cleaners and needed checking. Eventually anyway. Mark and Alex sat around in the sunshine and drank tea and talked for ages before getting down to do some work but apparently they were talking about work and tents and stuff so that’s allowed. Seventeen tents had been dropped off and every one had to be unpacked and checked for damage (not done by the cleaners I hasten to add but by the company who had them before) so that Mark could make a list of bits required to mend them before they can be sold. It took ages so I went to sleep for a while and woke up to find that they’d pitched one of the tents next to the car so it could be checked and graded. I do like the Ranger bell tents – very big and very cool and still able to be erected by one person in 15-20 minutes. And then we were off to the fun part of the day.

6th Ashton scouts had to be aborted due to the roof, panels and side poles being sent to the wrong address which was why we had to drive all the way down and all the way up again. We arrived for an evening training session which was always going to be fun – failing light, black tent – you get the picture and unloaded and assembled everything required to construct their lovely new German Scout tent – an 8m Jurte. The explorers we were training were excellent fun and the roof soon went up (although I do believe there will be some extra knot practicing in the very near future. We managed to inflict the usual array of errors into the training but the best bit was when Mark demonstrated how stable the Jurte was by kicking out not just one of the centre poles but two of them! And the tent stayed up! It’s a very cool demonstration but please be careful if you do it as the centre bit with its metal ends does come thudding down. On second thoughts, don’t do it.

They managed to get the tent up and sorted out before it got too dark – luckily the scout hut has bright exterior lights – and then the scouts learnt all about folding up the sides and roof before packing it all away ready for its first proper trip out. We ended the evening with a meeting and the obligatory photo call of the scouts and me. I liked the 6th Ashton. They were fun and had respect for Giraffes.

I’m looking forwards to hearing more about their adventures in the future.

We stayed with Ash and Sarah again and Mark delivered lots of Ikea pressies that Sarah had asked for (Ikea is near the scout hut) and, apparently, naughty Mark didn’t like the dolls for sale so he took the one on display even though it was cable tied to the shelf! I should be ‘disgusted Giraffe of Germany’ but I think it was in fact quite funny and showed great initative. The next day we headed back to Germany. A long long dull trip of motorways and very boring border signs. I’ve now given Inga the task of finding cool border signs in Europe for me to travel to.

In the meantime, enjoy your Jurte 6th Ashton!

So, we killed our advertising at the start of the year. No print adverts (sorry Scouting Magazine but we will probably be back next year), No Google Adwords. No nothing. And has it has an effect? No idea! As we had never really measured our advertising before other than looking at the mounting costs, it’s hard to say what effect not doing it has had. With three months gone I have decided to see where we are in terms of keywords and phrases on the major search engines as, let’s be honest, that’s how most people find things these days.

What a revelation that has been.

I was reasonably aware of where we sat in terms of page placement for most of our keywords and I was expecting that we would have dropped a bit for some of them as they’re highly competitive e.g. bell tents, but some of the results are strange to say the least. Overall, with the exception of one specific area, we appear to have either held our own or even gone up in terms of page ranking despite doing no advertising. I had always been under the impression, and even been told, that using ads on Google, Yahoo or Bing would raise your page rank. And maybe it does. All I can say for certain is that ceasing to advertise doesn’t necessarily decrease your page rank once you’ve gotten it. This would explain why articles and stuff from 3/4 years or more ago still rank highly even though they are pretty irrelevant now.

The difference in how you’re placed between the search engines is another revelation and just goes to show that what you consider relevant is not necessarily what the search engine considers relevant e.g. Google indexes our blog entries and notes our tags but Bing appears not to.

I am going to attribute not falling down the page rank to the blog articles I keep writing (despite Bing ignoring them) which means that you’re going to get more of them; less blogging and more article perhaps, but still more waffling, wittering and frothing from me about tents and tent related stuff.

If nothing else, the few hours I’ve spent doing searches and noting rankings has made me aware of where we’re not promoting ourselves properly so at least I have areas to concentrate on for the next few weeks/months. I suppose the mantra now had to be; Content, Content, Content. And photo’s. And tea.

I’m going to try and chart the progress of our main keywords every month so it’ll be interesting to see if specific articles cause a shift in placement.

Time to start writing.

We were delivering a nice new 8m Jurte and the sun shone down on an excellent turn out of scouts and leaders to be given their training on a nearby field. It did feel a bit like breaking in when we had to climb over the gate having forgotten the key to the padlock. The scouts were pretty attentive even if we were on a playing field and the sun was shining and soon got the hang of putting up the roof on its side poles and practising their knot skills on the guy ropes. It was the sort of training I enjoy – one where I do very little other than boss people about!

With the roof up on the side poles we moved on to lashing the centre tripod and getting the roof up properly. This went, I am glad to say, wrong. We like it when things go wrong as you can learn so much more. The tripod went in, the roof went up and it sagged horribly (my fault as I told them to lash the tripod in the wrong place – hee hee. One relashing later it went up again and was great. So we took it down again as we hadn’t put the cap on (again deliberate – it’s hard to see what is happening with the roof and chain and tripod when the cap is on and blocking the light). Down and Up again – after 5 minutes of failing to get the cap guys to go over the roof edge and it was perfect. unfortunately not. We had introduced a chain mistake which was fixed in the time honoured way byhoisting a scout up through

the roof so it could be fixed. Ta da! One roof, all up and looking pretty good. All was made perfect by tensioning the main guys and the roof snapped into place – taut but not tight. Now, usually at this point we are exceptionally cruel and make everyone button the sides on but, as the sun was shining, we just played around practising with a couple of panels so everyone knew both the right technique and the pain of buttoned panels above your head. Then it all came down and got neatly packed away before we headed back for a barbeque. In March. In Northumberland. Which was great.

All in all a great training session and another wonderful enthusiastic scout group who I know will make good use of their beautiful 8m Jurte (eat your heart out Julie @ Wigton, it’s bigger than yours! )

And then we were off leaving them to play for the rest of the weekend while we did some real work – scouts! We headed for Manchester (Ashton under Lyne to be specific) to do the delivery and training for the 6th Ashton Scout group. And it was, well, a disaster. A total utter cockup. The supplier – normally reliable – had sent all the panels and the roof to Dorset instead of to Manchester. Duh! That meant we now had to extend our trip by a few days, drive down to Dorset and then back up to Manchester to do training on a Thursday evening. Mark was not impressed and I wasn’t particularly looking forwards to hours on the boring motorway (not my idea of what a travelling giraffe should be doing). We departed the 6th Ashton and went to see an old friend for the night (Hello Paul).

Sunday saw us on another massive drive. Up the M6 to Penrith to drop off a Ranger bell tent. I always like going up the M6 towards the Lake District, the hills look so pretty, almost like they are a painted backdrop and not real. And then we whizzed across and up the country to a lovely little place called Whittingham to meet up with a Baden Powell Scout Group and deliver their 8m Jurte. This time the panels had turned up so we could do the training on the local school field. The scouts were mostly attentive but the sun was shining and we were on a playing field so we all kind of played This training went very well as several things went wrong. I still don’t understand why things going wrong is good but I did enjoy it when they hoisted a scout out the top to fix a chain fault. They all seemed very enthusiastic about the tent which was wonderful to see and afterwards we all went back to the leader’s lovely house and had a barbeque. In March. Outside. In Northumberland!

the next day saw us facing the long drive to Dorset but I rebelled (I can be quite a bolshie giraffe at times) and reminded Mark quite firmly that he had promised to take me to the border crossing between England and Scotland. So we played hookey for the day instead and did some proper giraffe travelling which involves frequent stops for pictures and seeing things.

First off we headed towards the border and stopped to look out across the National Park. Wow.

It’s quite amazing up there; wild and beautiful with the sort of huge horizon and sky you don’t expect from the UK. I would have liked to run across the fields but the local sheep were giving me evil looks so I decided discretion was the better part of valour and we went to the border crossing instead.

I was expecting something dull and boring – like the signs I always see as we drive down the motorway in Europe; dull boring EU signs. Instead I got a HUGE rock and a man strangling a cat (Mark said they were something called bagpipes and were a traditional Scottish instrument but I’ve heard the cats make the same sort of noise when they’re trodden on so I don’t believe him). I insisted on having my picture taken on both sides of the border to prove I crossed over without the aid of a passport or any form of exotic animal export paperwork (such a naughty giraffe too) and then we went off to another scout camp at Kielder Water. I have reminded him that we haven’t take my picture at any of the other borders yet and that’s no on my agenda – and not the dull EU signs either. I want proper old fashioned border signs to prove I’m a travelling giraffe.

Kiedler Water is huge. It’s a massive special kind of lake called a reservoir which is where they store water for some reason or other. We drove, took pictures and then took in Hawkhirst Scout Activity Centre which was quite amazing. And then we ran out of time and had to head back down south to find a bed for the night at the always welcoming Ash & Sarah’s (with the gorgeous Dorothea of course).

More pics below and part 2 – the return to Manchester coming soon (as soon as I beat my secretary into submission and make him write it up for me, anyway!)

So I came up with my own.

It’s not designed to to be the solution to everyone’s genealogy problems and, indeed, it doesn’t even record all the information that a real ‘expert’ would demand but it does have the benefit of making it very easy for me to keep track of what I’ve done and where I am. And it’s simple. Really simple. Like me.

So, some background. I predominantly use 3 tools in my research; Ancestry.co.uk, FreeBMD and Reuinion on my trusty Macbook (can’t believe they’ve ditched the Macbook and claim an Air is just as good – sometimes Apple are total muppets! Got to prostitute myself to afford a Pro now..) I used to use GenesReunited but let that subscription slip for now.

So:

Step 1. No printed information should exist in more than 1 place. This means that ANY information that refers to more than one person must be indexed and held separately: census forms, marriage certificates – No duplication is allowed.

Step 2 – Every item of shared information must be given a unique identification code.

Step 3 – Record these against the relevant people (otherwise what’s the point)

Step 4 – All personal information should be filed in alphabetical/year of birth order

Step 5 – Keep a simple index of what information has been found for which person.

Steps 1-4 are pretty normal and, I expect, even step 5 is carried out by most people in one way or another. In which case, congratulations, you are ahead of me and I bow down and worship at your feet (your toenails need clipping btw and that lime green varnish does your feet no favours at all; go for cherry red next time)

I started by creating a new folder for Census Forms and adding dividers for each year from 1841 to 1911 (as I don’t have any forms for earlier years yet). This folder is called CF (for Census Forms – I’m not a believer in having to work at anything too hard). There will be one for Marriage certificates soon (called MC no doubt) but as I’m not buying many at the moment it can wait. Every entry in the folder will have the same index format – CF/xx/yyyy where xx is the year in two digits (yes I know I’ll be in trouble in 1941 but that’s a long way away) and yyyy is the form number including the zeroes (0001,0002 etc). I generally scrawl this on the bottom right of each form (CF/01/0023 for example). Next I took the information off each form and entered it into my software creating a new source for each form and assigning it to the entry under the relevant person – See the pic for further details. I can now look at the entry in Reunion and instantly see that I have found Charles Dunk in the census and printed off the form and done the filing. Everyone else on the form is assigned the same source for that entry on their record.

Once this had been completed for every form I had (and there were several hundred so it took a while) I suddenly had alot less paper to deal with.

Next I created people folders: one for each of my main names (Royal & Dunk) and one for everyone else A-Z and filed everyone in chronological birth order. Some of my entries consist of a divider with the name and year of birth and just one person sheet so it gets a bit heavy on dividers but I’ve found it’s worth it just for the ease of quickly finding someone when you do want to file or find paperwork.

Once everything was organised I discovered that, while I felt better and it was alot neater and even took up less space, I was still unable to recall what I had discovered. I played around with flags and fields and searches in Reunion (being an IT child I wanted an IT solution) and managed to create even more work for myself so instead went back to the drawing board – in this case literally – and came up with an indexing system that is simple, quick and, most importantly, based on a piece of paper so is software independent.

To the right is the top section of the index for the Dunk family (as well as an example of how bad my writing is!).

The index consists of a simple chart with all the information I consider relevant marked along the top – as I have family who emigrated and who were in the armed forces in both wars and after I have columns for these. This is version 2 of the index and I will probably produce version 3 shortly with an additional column on the end for the married family name as I’ve taken to writing that on anyway.

It works very simply. You pick a person to start with; in this case John Dunk b 1829 (as far back as this branch goes so far). Underneath is his wife with her surname in brackets to indicate it is her maiden name and under her is all the children – usually in birth order but there’s no guarantee you have them all to start with. You then start filling out the index:

X – no record to be found i.e. born after that census date or not in armed forces or emigrated or died before the next census etc.

Highlighted – record found (and hopefully recorded/indexed/filed)

Horizontal arrow – This indicates that a daughter has gotten married and her record continues on another page. This must be accompanied by a page reference at the end and her new surname. In the example you can see that Annie Jane Dunk got married after the 1881 census to someone called Cock and her record continues on Dunk page 6 (I currently have Dunk pages and Royal pages but you could just have one massive index if you prefer)

Vertical arrow (usually down the left side) – This indicates that a son has gotten married and the family name continues further down the page. Here you can see that Charles Dunk married Mabel (Bingham). Under her are listed their children. The vertical line from Lilian May is a mistake but I couldn’t be bothered to rewrite the entire page and still haven’t found my tipex to correct it!

At a glance I can see what information has been found or not e.g. James Dunk b 1854 has no census entry for 1871 or 1911 and I still have to find his marriage (unlikely as he was still single in 1901 age 47) or his death. If I now look at his record in Reunion I can see, in the notes section, that I have looked for him in the 1911 census and found no entry nor have I found a death record for him between 1901 & 1911. It takes me only a few minutes to ascertain exactly where I had gotten to with my Dunk research and to pick it up again.

If the family looks like it is going off the bottom of the page then you can simply put a contd and a page reference number – it doesn’t have to be sequential either. This is Dunk page 1 and Dunk page 2 is for Arnold (married name of Emma Dunk b 1861). Further down the page – where you can’t see it – is the entry for my mother which has a page reference of Royal 2.4 indicating that she continues elsewhere in the family.

I have found these indexes to be incredibly useful in keeping track of where I am and what I have/have not found out so far about the family. By starting a new sheet for each different married name you can also avoid getting confused over who is who and which line is which. Finally, as they’re on paper they are easily corrected (you can see where I have corrected birth years above) which avoids having to constantly reprint information so you’re saving the lives of twigs everywhere.

Attached to this blog entry is hopefully the blank index sheet in both pdf and ods format so you can use/modify to your hearts content without fear of recrimination or sulking unless of course you try and pass it off as your own in which case I reserve the right to be horrible and mean to you. But it won’t come to that cos, so far, I’ve only ever met nice people doing family history research.

Enjoy and I hope you find it useful. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received.

Mark

Family Index Sheet   Family Check list