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K/NIBB/S  ONE NAME STUDY

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7.  YOUR HOST

Hi there!  Hope you're enjoying your visit. Who is this guy?!!

Alan JACKSON's the name.  Michèle, my wife is the 'KNIBB' in the family.  Not strictly true as her mother Kay (Kathleen Dawn Mary) was the one born a KNIBB.  So why did I get involved?

A cousin had tracked my paternal great grandfather to Denmark and once I had found his bride in Oldenburg, Germany and that the families had come from Southern Germany, Mosbach in one case, I rather ran out of leads.  My maternal grandmother came from Vienna and her husband from the Polish/Russian border.  Whereas I tracked one branch back to Bohemia and another to Hungary, carrying out such research from Leeds, England was not very easy, as you can imagine.

Meanwhile I had started on my wife's paternal side but came up against a brickwall in Somerset.  I still dabble there but early retirement gave me scope to attack the KNIBBs.

I was a Solicitor with British Gas which underwent radical changes after privatisation.  Having had to close down the office in Leeds after 15 years at the helm, I didn't really fancy a move elsewhere.  Although my home town was Brighton and I had spent 18 happy years in Leicestershire, my young daughters, Emily and Harriet, were happily settled at their school in Leeds.  They're not yet enthused with the family history - we've visited too many graveyards at home and abroad for that!

The K/NIBB/S One Name Study hasn't exactly taken over my life but I do spend a fair amount of my time on it one way or another.  I still remember the first time I heard about
William KNIBB in a history lesson at school.  I also recall learning about Joseph KNIBB as a renowned English clockmaker, alongside TOMPION.  This was many years before I met Michèle.  Perhaps we were fated to meet!  Her distant cousin, Michael PEARMAN first made the connection between the family and William KNIBB.  His hand drawn chart was amazing and he had painstakingly copied all K/NIBB/S from huge sections of the old St Catherine's House Birth Marriage and Death Registers.

Once I had gone as far as I could filling a screen with as many of the 3x great grandparents of my daughters, my computer stood ready to capture Michael's KNIBBs.  I was then using an Atari STFM without a hard disk.  Even in those days, it was possible to design innovative hypertext genealogical presentations using text, graphics and sound - thanks to Dave BECKER.  A public domain library submitted one of my efforts to an Atari magazine which  gave it a good review.  Another program by Tony GREENWOOD was effectively an HTML forerunner and could produce stunning results.

As my system expanded, more KNIBBs came within my grasp.  Having established that it would run my genealogy software ('Family Tree' by Ian & Mark BAKER and 'Newgen 5K' by Ted RICHARDS), I graduated to an Atari Falcon 030 which I still use for the K/NIBB/S One Name Study, all correspondence, graphics, scanning, midi etc.  It is a basic 4 meg RAM machine expanded to 14 megs, with CD Rom and Syquest ez-flyer drives.  I acquired a notebook computer to enable me to access CD Roms, such as the 1881 census and UK Info 4.  Why, oh why, do essentially database content CD Roms have to have a Windows/Mac front end?  The notebook also fares better than the Atari on the Internet.

Sadly, the Atari format is now virtually dormant.  Atari Computing, the last platform dedicated magazine in the UK ceased production a while back.  However, the articles it contained on HTML were another very helpful source of information to me on preparing this website.

Apart from computing,  I enjoy playing tennis (at least three times a week), I'm taking piano lessons (my teacher can trace her teachers back to BEETHOVEN! - all documented), walk as often as possible with Michèle and a local group in the countryside and now have the opportunity to read for pleasure, rather than having to keep up with the ever changing law - I'm a fan of eg Alistair MACLEAN, Gerald SEYMOUR and John GRISHAM but am into Stephen LEATHER at present.  We are fortunate to have the West Yorkshire Playhouse close by and the other amenities of a large City.  Finally, my snooker club, within walking distance, provides the perfect facility to ensure that I have a misspent retirement!

So that's me!

bfn

Alan

Here's a list of the Websites that I visit most frequently and/or find most useful, starting with those that kindly have reviewed and/or placed links to my site:-

Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet
Dick EASTMAN's Ancestry.com genealogy letter
The SurnameWeb
Don KNIBBS' website
Leith Hutton's Genealogy Site

See thousands of resources, surnames, links and features at
Mark Ellsworth Hickman's Many Genealogy Pages


The LDS Church Family Search Internet Genealogy Service
Hugh WALLIS' IGI Batch Numbers site
FreeBMD Ever growing extracts from the England and Wales General Record Office Indices
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
The UK Public Record Office
The PRO A2A database
Gendex

The Archive CD Books project
The British Library Online Newspaper Archive

Abney Park Cemetery Indexing Project
University Research Library Catalogue - COPAC

USGenWeb Archives Search Engine
The US National Obituary Archive
American Memorials
The American Colonist's Library - Primary source documents relating to early American History
Bibliofind

Electronic Telegraph

Atarinet for a current on-line Atari magazine
Atari Computing for everything Atari

And search engines:-

Alta Vista
Google
InFind
Yahoo


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e mail: jackari2@aol.com
OR Write to K/NIBB/S One Name Study
6 Whitechapel Close  Leeds
LS8 2PT   ENGLAND
Telephone: 0113 293 1907

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