Recipe: Amelie Scrap Back To School PP, DMogstad Carnival Paper, H Roselli Carnival Paper Cream, KPetiet Paper Tear, Linda GB In Vogue Safety Pin, MMartin Carnival Bead Swirl, Carola Frame, SC Lingerman Carnival Tag2, CK Becky and 4990810 fonts

Yesterday we decided to clean up all the leaves in the backyard. The kids helped out with the rakes, as well as their own pail and shovel to scoop up the leaves.





After we were done they played ball in the park behind our house.



Click here for more photos.

I'm sure you remember that I took Jessica Sprague's "Up and Running" Digital Scrapbooking course back in August. Well I enjoyed it so much and learned tons so I signed up for her "Now We're Rockin'" Level 2 course.

Here is my layout from Week 1.
I highly recommend Jessica's courses. She is an amazing teacher, the videos are well presented and are available even after you complete the course. The forums are great for support and the courses are relatively inexpensive for what you get.

Kyra is really rejecting my theory that in Fall/Winter one should only wear pants. On Friday she insisted that we had to go out and buy dresses and tights. Then she came home right away and put one on.

This will create a new copy of the photos in the folder you specified which you can then upload. You can also choose to resize the file at the same time if you want.

Just a few photos from J's 2nd birthday here.

Today we did something that I've only ever done once before, visit a pumpkin patch. Ok, I know that I'm pretty old to have only done this once before (with my 3rd cousin, 1 removed, Vic and his son Ian in Hamilton, ON in 1999) but we don't have pumpkins in England so there are no patches :(

So we took the kids to a pumpkin patch for the first time (J couldn't walk last year, and the year before I was expecting him, and the year before that K was only 6 months old!).



Everyone had a great time seeing the pumpkins, getting lost in a hay maze and getting their photos taken behind various "cut-outs".



For more photos click here.

P.S. I'm trying out Bren Boone's Lightroom Presets this week. If you like them you can get them here.

http://www.familyhistoryliveonline.com/ is holding a special training session for Family History Consultants on Tuesday 9th October. As the name of the web site suggests, the training is held online and is live (i.e. not recorded).

FAIR AGENDA (all times Mountain Standard Time)

8:00 AM - 8:50 AM Log On and Check Your Sound System
8:55 AM - 9:00 AM Welcome - Gena Philibert Ortega, CA, USA
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Helping Family History Happen - Sandra Raymond Jarvis, UT,USA
10:10 AM - 11:10 AM Helping Members - Sandra Raymond Jarvis, UT,USA
11:15 AM - 11:45 AM Break
11:50 AM - 12:50 PM Consultant Resources - Gena Philibert Ortega, CA, USA
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Temple and Family History Work - Amy Anderson, CO, USA

I have reviewed the fair syllabus and would recommend this training to family history consultants that are also church members.

If you haven't read this yet http://howardlindzon.com/?p=2725, you should. While this is actually quite funny it is also a pretty depressing state of affairs to think that this is what women really believe (sets the women's liberation movement back several decades!). And while you might think that it doesn't happen around here, believe me, it does - maybe not to the same extent - but I've heard it myself from women in their late teens/early 20s.

After having a great Summer filled with lots of fun activities with my 2 small kids, I'm back with some sad genealogical news. Apparently the Family Records Center in London is to close next year BUT all of the birth, marriage and death indexes (1837-2007) will be removed on 27 October 2007 prior to next year's closure.

I am not sure why the FRC is closing. Every time I am there it is jam packed (my last visit was in 2004). I can only assume that because indexes are online (albeit for a fee) that they have determined that the center is no long cost effective.

This is the end of an era as the FRC (back then St. Catherine's House) was how I first got into genealogy in 1990-3 when I attended University in London. I used to visit the center regularly to do my family history research and without this center I doubt I would have ever stumbled into this fascinating and enjoyable hobby.

For those of you interested in this amazing resource, most of the records have been transcribed and are available for free on http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/ or http://www.ancestry.com/.

If you don't have access to the Internet, many Family History Centers have actual reproductions (not transcriptions) of the index on microfilm and microfiche on site and if your local FHC doesn't have the index you are looking for it can be ordered in from the main library in Salt Lake City which has them all.