I have gone back to an old pursuit, cleaning up tatty images, this time of garter stall plates for my own enjoyment. This has taken ages; I have had to learn two new graphics programs, with much help from Rob Davison, the author of Compo which enormously improved my productivity: down from most of a day for complex images to an hour and a half each. Anyhow the result is that very little genealogy has been done.

I got fed up with Google queries pulling in all the out-of-date records on my old Freewebs site, so deleted virtually everything there. A chorus of two complaints erupted, showing that they had not noticed my promises to move. Apologies to anyone who was truly inconvenienced but the only real way to be sure you are going to up-to-date information is to start with http://powys.org.

Much more exciting has been that I have moved my database from the unsupported Generations on PCs to the still supported Reunion on the Mac. Reunion is, of course, what Generations started out as until the PC version was sold and now lost. Fortunately the Generations files can still be converted to work on Reunion and the Support staff kindly did this for me in the space of a few hours. The advantage of this conversion is both that there is no loss of data and that the program is substantially the same so that there is no learning difficulty. The only other transfer that was loss-less was into TMG, The Master Genealogist, but I just did not like its user interface.

Of course this also meant that I had to acquire a Mac, to give me my third and very different operating system here (I have a fourth, Unix, but really have yet to understand it, let alone get start to use it). Fortunately Apple have recently brought out the Mac Mini so the price was not the extravagance that Macs used to be. Learning to use it has not been hard though I have yet to find how to persuade the directory viewers to be permanently less clunky and childlike. I did have to completely reinstate everything after the link to my RISC Machine slowed to a crawl, doubtless caused by one of the upgrades I had downloaded (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

Major contributions coming in have been, as ever, John Ravilous with his continued good research and interesting speculations on mid-medieval English families; Martyn Freeth on early Powys ancestors, and Paul Waller on the ancestry and family of Fanny Worth.

The main database now stands at 19,561 people, of whom 7192 are ancestors and 7706 relatives with the rest being in-laws. Not all these numbers are on this website as they are living people and I like to obtain agreement before including them.

I nearly forgot: I've managed to put about 50 pictures of ancient ancestors and relations onto my site. The only difference is that while there is a link from my site, the sizes of the picture files means that I cannot store them there. Instead they are on a little RISC OS machine that is now thirteen years old but quietly hums away and presents the images to the few that will enquire. Any contributions of images that I do not have will be enormously appreciated.