Are the days of impatiently waiting for the postman to deliver a letter that you’re eagerly awaiting over? Sadly I think they ‘almost’ are. Thanks largely to email, the days of receiving a letter in the post has almost completely died. Honestly I cannot remember when I last received something that wasn’t a bill, a letter from the bank offering me a new credit card, or details of what’s happening in my area from my local council.

But for the past two weeks I have been eagerly checking my letterbox daily.

So what has got me so excited? Certificates of course. What genienut doesn’t LOVE certificates? I recently splurged and ordered nine certificates from the General Register Office (GRO) in a bid to verify the children on my 3x great grandparents – well at least those from the first marriage. And after 20 days of waiting (the GRO offer the quickest service), they arrived today.

Planes, maybe a train, and no doubt buses and taxis, as well as a big ship are what I will be experiencing soon, as in a few days time I’ll be on my way to London to go on Unlock the Past’s 5th cruise. So the suitcase is out, the passport is packed, and so are my European plugs, and my Unlock the Past cruise t-shirts. The rest I need to work out this weekend!

This is Unlock the Past’s 5th history and genealogy cruise, and it will be first real international one, as all their previous cruises have left from either Australian or New Zealand ports. This one starts from London, then goes up to Scotland, around to Ireland, stops at the Islands, touches on France, and then heads back to London. So it’ll be quite a trip!

While my own overseas research has taken a back seat for a little while, as I concentrate more on my Australian emigrants, and their families out here, I do have a strong connection to Cornwall with a number of my families hailing from there, as well as a few of Mr Lonetester’s gang too.

As my Cornish roots are ones that I have traced reasonably extensively, I became familiar with a number of free websites that are useful for researching your Cornish ancestors. I don’t claim to be an expert by any means, just someone who’s researching their family history and came across a bunch of websites that I found useful. Anyway  thought I’d share my favourite ones with you here. This did start out as being a “top 10 list”, but as you can see it grew, and grew as I went through all the sites I have bookmarked under Cornish Genealogy <grin>.

You might think hang on, what is she doing. Is she starting the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge again??  In short no, but let me explain. As I never actually did the letter A thanks to a lack of inspiration which lasted until about the letter J or so, and I really would like to complete the whole alphabet, I am doing it now. And I figured it was better to do it at the end, rather than right in the middle. So for my A post …

A is for … A2A (Access to Archives)

Some of you may have heard of the A2A website, others may not have. But for me it is one of the most amazing sites around.