Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Starting as I mean to go on

An empty house today was a good opportunity for clearing emails and work on the study.

Whilst checking ebay notifications, I came across a reference to a “Lorris and Roger Parry”. Further investigation revealed Roger Parry (1905-1977) was a French artist. The “Lorris” turned out to be a Fabian Loris rather than “Lorris Parry”. But given that registered one-name studies carry out worldwide research, it is great to find someone in a country where the surname rarely occurs.

There are also references to work by 20 other Parry related artists on the artnet site so I shall have a look through those later.

Ebay can be an interesting source of information – I didn’t know a Parry wrote a “Cyclopaedia of Perfumery”. There’s also another French connection, as a Parry-Vielle limoges box is listed. I don’t know the reason for the Parry in this company’s name and it looks as if the company’s website is unavailable so no source for their history there. But searching for more information on them did net me 4 Parrys from a list of voters in Placer County, CA, in 1890. Although I did decide not to sidetrack to explore all the other companies that are found by searching www.parry- on google. That's an activity for another day.

I didn’t actually submit any entries to the Liverpool Marriage challenge, given how many there were for Parrys. However, I did send the challenger a list of them, in case it was useful in helping to narrow down the possible churches for other people’s entries (since I had been able to identify a reasonable number of the churches by using the Liverpool BMD site). Today I received a file back, with over 200 of the exact dates added in, as well as a few of the churches I had not been able to identify. That will certainly be a great help and was a lovely surprise.

In order to ensure the study progresses, I am planning to try doing some work on extractions or transcriptions most days, before replying to correspondence. Today I managed to transcribe the entries for Anglesea and Berkshire from GS Parry’s book of PCC Abstracts. However, I didn’t then manage to finish emails to the three new correspondents (the third new one arrived today) so the plan may not always work.

But at least I’ve tried!