Monthly Archives: January 2017

Turgenev and the Red Queen

Posted on January 22, 2017 by dgm

In 1876, Turgenev wrote a poem Croquet in Windsor about the Bulgarian atrocities in which he imagines Queen Victoria watching a croquet game at Windsor in which the balls were the heads of massacred bulgarian christians. A very powerful image, … Continue reading →

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Open source genealogy–lessons learned

Posted on January 20, 2017 by dgm

Well, my little fun exercise chasing John Moncur through Napoleonic era naval lists and so on has shown me that it’s perfectly possible to use open source materials, with two important caveats – firstly, the person investigated has to be … Continue reading →

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Open source genealogy

Posted on January 19, 2017 by dgm

Out of curiosity I thought I’d see what I could find out about John Moncur, who was a Royal Navy Master and Commander at the end of the eighteenth century, and who just possibly might be an ancestor of mine, … Continue reading →

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Slavery’s legacy ?

Posted on January 16, 2017 by dgm

I have a slightly unusual surname, and while I’m not an expert on my family’s history by any means, everything seems to point back to somewhere in the north east of Scotland as a point of origin, and in the … Continue reading →

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New year 2017

Posted on January 1, 2017 by dgm

Well we sat out on the deck, ate prawns and drank champagne while we watched the sun set. Later on we watched a reprise of the Queen 1975 Christmas Eve concert and a doco on the Stones, while the cat … Continue reading →

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