The Tangle - Photogallery

[Nuytsia]

I checked our your website, and Google did a somewhat mangled job of translating the home page, but Google refused to translate any of the other pages. (damn you Google!)
Looks good though!
I did a little bit of tracing my family tree a while back, which was fun!
No-one else in my family is really interested though, so unfortunately I had to start from very little information. To get much more done I'd have to start purchasing certificates etc, and I don't really want to put money into it at the moment.

[Albertosaurus Rex]

Purchasing certificates? I don't know where you live and where your family came from, but can't you photocopy them at the archive? (I have to admit that a lot of my research took place via internet and that I don't have all the certificates I would like to have.)

An amusing aside, after doing tracing my family 300 years back, I discovered that my (sadly diseased) great-aunt had done the same research in her time. I was able to get some dates from her research, but I was pleased to see that I had discovered some family lines that she had missed.

[Nuytsia]

Yep, I am not sure about what you can do for free at the actual archive (if anything).
So far I have done it all online, as my family are from other parts of Australia than where I live now. So the relevant records offices are in other States.
You can get a little bit of information for free online, which is how I got to where I am now. If I want to get more detailed, and older, information a lot of it requires to actually get a copy of Marriage Certificate, Death Certificate, Birth Certificate etc. This always costs money. I did get one so far and they mailed the copy out to me. It WAS good to get it though! Filled in quite a few pieces of information for me (this was a marriage certificate).
The rest of my family that I know about are from England and Scotland. As far as I know the situation is the same for those records? You can't get much, if any, information for free. I did find out a bit by just getting a basic subscription to one of those online genealogy sites for a month.
Unless there are things I don't know about!

Here's a pic, seeing this is the pic thread. It was taken from my lounge room. Pretty!

[Image: 6ca26205f93e5386e6c2629ff9f012c45648dce3.JPG]

[Albertosaurus Rex]

That certainly does sound like a complicated situation. My ancestors just lived in different parts of the Netherlands, which I'm sure you know is a pretty small country, so travelling to archives if necessary doesn't take all that much time.

(Although some of my mother's ancestors came from Flanders a few hundred years ago.)

[maulkin]

The 1901 census for England is available online, if that helps.

I recently attempted to trace my paternal grandfather's ancestry. He came to England from Trinidad during the 2nd World War. It seems that his father was from Aberdeenshire, in Scotland (where a small village bears my family name). His mother was from an old West Indian planter family. That would be interesting to follow up but might require a trip to Barbados. I had better start saving for the flight!

[Mervi]

So. I probably won't post a photo of myself here, but I was just tweeting about my fish tank, and realized I should post a couple of fish photos here because they are totally related.

I have a fish tank that is about 300 liters (79 gallons?) and I've named some of the biggest fish in it (with the most distinctive personalities) after Hobb's characters. It all started with none other than Regal about 4 years ago when I got a pair (a male and a female) of pearl gouramis. The species is known for two things: it's beauty and it's gentle nature. Except I got one that hadn't read any fish books and didn't know this. He turned out to be a real bully who forced his mate to stay hiding among the plants and rocks until she died of stress/hunger. Then he proceeded to tyrannize the Angel fish. So, I had a really beautiful male fish who liked to push around everyone just for the sake of it - can you blame me when I started to talk about him as Regal? He actually started to finally calm down a bit during the last year, and today when I cleaned the tank he had disappeared. I think he was just old, and probably just hid among the plants until he died and then my Striped Raphael catfish probably ate him. Still, fish that big don't usually just disappear overnight! (Okay, I hadn't actually been much home/paying attention to the fish for a couple of days, but still.) And I don't keep ferrets...

So, after Regal had his name, I of course had to name the two Angels Patience (because he didn't really mind about Regal's tantrums) and Lacey (because he has a really beautiful pattern in his sides). Oh, and I didn't know at the time that the ladies were actually male, it's almost impossible to figure out the gender of your Angels.

So, here are the photos:
A very young Regal
Regal and young Patience
Closer look at Patience
Lacey

[Albertosaurus Rex]

He turned out to be a real bully who forced his mate to stay hiding among the plants and rocks until she died of stress/hunger.

What the heck?

By the way, is that you in your avatar, Nuytsia?

[Nuytsia]

Maulkin thanks for that, I think I have referred to that census in the past and got whatever information I could from it. I wish people had more unusual names back then. It seems lots of people had the same name! Half the males in my family were called George or William I think!!! And most of them seemed to have very common surnames.
Hey sounds like you have a great 'excuse' for a trip to a nice tropical island!!
The Scots must have been a well travelled people in those times. My ancestors from Scotland lived in India for a generation or two.
Mervi thanks for the tank pics! I love fishtanks. I haven't had one for ages though. Yours looks really nice, I love the plants. I haven't had pearl gouramis - they look great. I have had angel fish - that lacey one is very unusual. Love the names, very appropriate!
Albertosaurus, fish are often doing nasty things to each other (in my experience anyway). I was told it was a very calming hobby, but I spent a lot of time stressing about them eating each other!
Hehehhe no that's not my pic in the avatar! (Now I'M one of those people I am too scared to ask about their avatar....)
It's Murray Hewitt

[Mervi]

Yeah, fishkeeping isn't as easy as a lot of people think it is. You can't just choose whatever species you think are pretty and put them together in a cute little bowl. Well, you can - but they will die very quickly. Some species will fight for space and/or food, some want to live alone and some require to have a whole school of them before they are happy. Some want lots of open space to swim around a water that moves around, and some prefer darker water and lots of hiding places. And then you need to know what sort of temperatures each one prefers and pH values and ... well, I'm not going to bore you with all the details.

Nyutsia you're not helping with my FotC withdrawal! We haven't seen season 2 here yet!

[Nuytsia]

That's one of the things I loved about fish Mervi!
There's so much you can read about and things you have to learn to get it right. I love that sort of researching probably just as much as the actual hobby itself! I think where I went wrong is as you said in your post - there's always some fish that hasn't read the books and doesn't act as it is supposed to

Season 2 of FotC is on here now! (it has been on here before, sorry to let you know that!)
That's what reminded me of Murray awesomeness.

For me it seems that much of the humour is based on New Zealand/Australian jokes and stereotypes, but it must make sense all over the world! (and I guess in USA obviously or it wouldn't have been made)

Oh here's some Pics too!!!
First , a skink and an ant.... all casual.... *skink whistles innocently*
[Image: 4530724863_586b552009_o.jpg]

But ...... a few seconds later ..... unleash hell!
[Image: 4530725179_b0205d7f81_o.jpg]
The ant never saw that coming!