Foreign Perspectives

A number of new information services that have came online in recent years have transformed the ease and ability to do family history research almost beyond recognition.

First of these was the arrival of the Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911 which make location of your family in those years a whole lot easier. As always, the more information that you have the better but even having just the name of the father and mother will let you identify your family from that time rather than a family that just happened to have a father with the same name as your grandfather. If you don’t already have a location for their house at that time, this will get you one along with the ages of them and all their children, plus the occupations of those working.

More recently, the General Records Office in Northern Ireland have allowed searches of records older than 75 years and that can get you well back with your family tree in very short order. With this you can search for births, marriages and deaths and get a copy of the certificates for £2 (searches are free and may be enough for you initially). Marriages are the best place to start as with just the name of the couple you can pick up the name of the father of each of them, their age and, of course, where the marriage took place. This in turn may belp you go back a generation using the name of the groom and his father along with his age (all on the marriage certificate). In principle, that can let you go back to an earlier marriage certificate and thereby another generation though you quickly hit the 1864 limit on registrations from where it’s off to the Public Records Office and their church records.

Sooner or later, you drop off the end of the online records as the church records have not, yet, been put online (due in part to objections from the churches) but they are available on microfiche in the Public Records Office and that should let you go back another generation relatively easily (to go back more with ease depends on how mobile your ancestors were).

Which is not to forget the previous mainstay of family history research (i.e. the Mormon site) but the above are more dependable.

One thing you don’t often think of for home use is a rackmount computer system.

However, that’s really what you should be looking at if you’re into something like serious gaming. Usually for gaming you’ll be sold the top end home computers but you can get a lot more for the money if you look at rackmount systems which basically start where the high end home PCs leave off so you’ve a lot more scope for heavy duty computing power.

Your only additional upfront cost is the rack itself but that’s something that doesn’t need to replace when you’re upgrading the components of your system.

A long time ago, child tax credit actually used to be a tax credit so for most people the amounts paid were automatically adjusted in line with their pay. Then Gordon Brown stepped in, renamed it and changed how it worked so that it became a benefit payment instead but still with a “tax credit” name.

So now, as with all benefit payments, you have to declare the amount of your income and they pay the child tax credit for this year in line with your income for last year. Snag is that you have to declare the income for tax credit purposes months before you need to declare it for tax purposes and if there’s any significant discrepancy, as we found out, the compliance department stop your payments. Except in our case, there wasn’t a discrepancy, it was just that we hadn’t completed our tax return before putting in the tax credit renewal.

Anyway, months later, when we put in the tax return, waited ’til it went to the tax credit people, called them to remind them, the back payment of several thousand pounds turned up and the regular payments restarted. Mind you, it had gone through six or seven people in the tax credit offices to get to that point.

However, several months after that, we received another missive from yet another person in the compliance department who’d just started working for the department a matter of weeks earlier and announced that the thousands of pounds we’d been paid had been paid incorrectly and we need to pay it all back. We, of course, appealed that or rather put the appeal in as they seem not to have bothered about it and now they’re looking for the money back. Well, assuming that a rather inexperienced clerk is correct and the six or seven much more experienced people are wrong.

Helpfully, all the local tax enquiry offices were closed down on June 30th and, as the remnant of the reception said, lots of people have found that it’s pretty much impossible to get through to the telephone enquiry services.

A few years back, that would have been an easy question to answer as laptops were so expensive that most people only had their work one.

Prices have dived though and that’s even before you consider the additional categories like netbooks and the newer tablet computers. For that matter, would you consider an ebook reader as a very small notebook computer? I suspect that most of us wouldn’t although the Sony runs a version of Linux so technically speaking it is a very small computer.

With that price drop the baby computers have long since ventured into home use and a growing number of people use several of them. I find that I use the little Acer netbook that I bought basically as a toy much more than both my other computers put together. Whilst it may not be as fast as them, it certainly makes up for lack of speed though sheer portability.

The basic argument of the Yes campaign is that it’s better that the people of Scotland are ruled by the people of Scotland i.e. that independence is a good thing by definition and they’re right. The basic argument of the No campaign is that there’s strength in numbers and they’re right too.

But which is actually best?

It’s certainly very easy to knock down the Yes arguments:

• the support from oil will be a lot less then the sums they are expecting not least because Alex seems to count every penny coming in as tax revenue rather than the 20% or so that would actually come in but even that’s from a much bigger base than he’ll have courtesy of various international agreements which divvy up the amounts based on population rather than land area.
• it certainly would be best for Scotland to continue to use the pound and the Bank of England but that just isn’t a runner so at best Alex will be stuck with his first plan B i.e. use sterling but outside a sterling-zone arrangement. Presumably the banks in Scotland wouldn’t be permitted to continue to print their own money as they do now so the Scottish notes would be replaced by Bank of England ones in this scenario.
• since an independent Scotland simply wouldn’t have the wherewithall to support the banking system, it seems certain that most, if not all, of their banks would have to relocate to England even aside from European laws requiring that. There’s going to be quite a hit to the economy and jobs should that happen. On a related note, the various investment companies based in Scotland are already preparing to move and, of course, you could hardly have National Savings (a branch of the UK Treasury) based in Glasgow anymore.
• the freebies (education, prescriptions, etc.) are mainly dependent on the oil revenue which is somewhat less than Alex seems to think it is or would be and, of course, that knocks the “oil premium” fund on the head too.
• defence industries ranging from Trident to loads of small and medium companies would almost certainly have to relocate because the MOD insists on having various key components made and assembled in the UK.
• the much lauded research facilities in the universities are going to have to find their funding elsewhere as the vast majority of the research institutes which fund them are UK institutions.
• Europe is something of a wildcard as nobody can really say what the outcome of negotiations might be at this stage but it seems unlikely to be plain sailing.

For the No camp, well the argument is that none of the above will happen if they win.

However, it’s not really so simple as that. As the Yes people say, it’s not so much the nitty gritty details but that Scotland should be run by the Scots. Which is grand for those at the top of the pile but not so good when you find (as happened just prior to them joining with England in 1600) that it takes twelve Scottish pounds to buy one English pound, that your job went south and your pension is pretty much worthless.