Reflections - An interview with SPVR

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Genealogy Series: Betsy (or Elizabeth) Esplin Bell (1858-1930).

Betsy (or Elizabeth) Esplin Bell (1858-1930). She had a long criminal record driven by her addiction to drink, but was she her husband’s victim? by Stewart Stevenson. Betsy was born on 26 th January 1858 in Dundee to David Bell, a carpenter, and his wife, Agnes Sandeman. i Father registered the birth, but is recorded as “Not Present”. George T Bisset-Smith, the Registration Examiner, published his book “Vital Registration”, the manual for Scottish Registrars in 1907. ii In it he states that a “liberal interpretation” should be given to the word “Present” in this context but also states that “Not Present” must not be used. I suspect that leaves most genealogists, me included, little the wiser as to what “Present” was actually supposed to mean. So let’s pass on to the story. Betsy’s parents married in 1856, iii with her mother Agnes making her mark, an ”X”, rather than signing the registration record, indicating that she was illiterate. Her husband David signed. ...

Genealogy Series: Bigamy, Adultery and Murder - Talk to Scottish Genealogy Society

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I fell into working in computing in the late 1960s at a time when people neither much loved nor hated the machines which are now central to our lives. If they thought about them at all, they were probably faintly, and rather disinterestedly, puzzled by them. As luck would have it, the very first system I worked on was one which depended on a communications network. The Bank of Scotland Computer Services Limited who had taken me on was developing a system which would put a terminal into each Bank of Scotland branch. Its purpose was to collect transactions and answer some fairly basic queries. And we were the first UK bank to implement such a system. Just; by a matter of weeks before Lloyds Bank. It's worth doing a "then-and-now" comparison of the technology on my desk with what we used then. There are two kinds of data memory on computers. The "main" memory in which we hold the programs, the logic directing the computer's decisions, and much of the data...

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