RootsChat.Com

Ah heck, thanks Ticketty.  I did read carefully all of the answers to date but didn't click/follow the link in the response you're referring to. Lesson learnt.  Well, FH is all about working on hunches and theories which you can either support or shoot down based on the the available evidence.  And following Golden Rule #1 : never try to move back further until you have proved to your own satisfaction that you are still moving up the right tree.

I did notice on looking at this that several people on Ancestry have mis-attributed James Brown on their trees as a preacher b. Lowick c1834.  But, hey, why let the evidence get in the way when you can add to the Ancestry mayhem ;-)  Now that FH is more and more "crowd-sourced", you do wonder what will happen in the future when everyone just accepts and imports everyone else's nonsense. If 99 people have the wrong info and 1 the correct, guess which one will hold sway...  Maybe we should go for establishing our Ancestry on a majority-vote basis rather than evidence-based.  It might make your DNA results a bit confusing though.

Thanks for that Jen - looks like we can start to dream of accessing the records again.

Molly - I take your point that some archives show distressing signs of "broken Britain" and budgetary cuts.  I'm hoping that The Story will be like Northumberland Records Office by which I mean that it will provide a good environment for research (whether or not shared with other council services) and some innovation in the provision of records previously only available on microfilm, i.e. that they'e started down the digitisation track.  I feel sorry for the staff at Tyne and Wear, clearly underfunded, understaffed and coping with a dwindling number of knackered old microfilm readers.

I'm optimistic about "The Story".  Don't start me on the daft name though - I already have to remember that "The Word" is actually South Shields Library, "The Hive" is Worcester Records Office and Library (near where I live currently), "The Great North Museum" is the Hancock and now "The Story"... sheesh.  Life was so much easier with plain old {insert county here} Records Office.  The marketing wonks have taken over!

Thanks again Boo ... you do wonder if anyone considered closing the original archives *after* the new building was ready to receive them.  I'm sure it would still have taken months to move all the miles of shelving of records but the key is in 'months' rather than 'years'.

Or if anyone considered that most family history lookups were done via the microfilm readers and a few shelves of indexes/transcripts and so not dependent on a major move plus entirely self-service.

That said it's the local historians I feel most sorry for and anyone trying to write a book, a thesis or a dissertation needing access to Durham source materials.  Given that Durham was the last local record office to re-open after Covid ... and for a very brief period before shutting again ... it will soon be 3 years without access.

So as not to appear too much of a moaner, I'm trying to look on the bright side also and hoping that some of the hints on the project page about digitisation extend to parish registers.  If the new record office plans to roll out something like the system at Woodhorn that would be great.  It feels increasingly 'stone age' in 2023 to be spooling through microfilm, particularly on the old hand-cranked specials :-)  I've been a visitor to Tyne and Wear Archives since 1985 and they're still using the same machines as then!

Thanks again for putting out some feelers on the FB page.

Jon

Does anyone know anything about progress on the above, now clearly not slated to re-open as advertised 'in late 2023'.

I have been watching the Twitter feed for "The Story" for a year now and in all that time it has studiously avoided giving *any* information on project progress - in a twelvemonth, just one tweet about the archivists working on moving the original parish registers, otherwise other unrelated local history stuff on a daily basis:

https://twitter.com/thestorydurham?lang=en

Similarly, the official project page hasn't been updated in yonks:

https://www.durham.gov.uk/article/23983/The-Story-so-far-and-next-steps

I am forward-planning a research trip in January 2025 and would love to think it might be open by then.  Am I being overly pessimistic in having doubts?!

Are you still getting this problem Ellenmai?  I have it too and, like you, have 'come back later' for more than 24 hours now without luck.

I have also tried a different browser (Edge) plus cleared out all cache, cookies etc. without fixing the problem.  I don't have Firefox at present.

I don't get it with actual DNA matches, as suggested by Ancestry.  It seems to crop up when, for example, I am looking at a tree with a lot of crossover with my own and click on the user name to check if I share any DNA with this person.  Assuming that there *is* no match, instead of getting the usual message to that effect or that the user has not taken a test, the error message that you reported crops up. 

Looks to me like a glitch which, I hope, Ancestry should fix soon.

P.S.  I am also now seeing it against some DNA matches - it seems ti be a problem with rendering the centimorgan match information