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 connected 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.  I used to curse, why, oh why, did essentially database content CD Roms have to have a Windows/Mac front end? but to no avail of course.  The notebook expired and I now have a new laptop alongside my Falcon which thanks to Bill GATES and others fares better on the Internet than the Atari ever could.

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

Apart from genealogy,  I enjoy playing tennis (at least three times a week), host my tennis and snooker club websites, in addition to that of FoRP - the Friends of Roundhay Park. Michèle and I are joint editors of their Newsletter. On retirement, I started taking piano lessons (my teacher could trace her teachers back to BEETHOVEN! - all documented) but have since lapsed awaiting virtual music on eg an iPad, walk as often as possible with Michèle and a local group in the countryside.  I'm into photography in a small way, struggle with Elements, but managed to win a cup at my camera club, heralding me as 'Photograper (sic) of the Year' (2010).  The club also gets first outings of my Audio Visual presentations - Perfect Timing (2011) features the IV on KNIBB Roman striking clocks.

Retirement also brings with it 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 Michael CONNELLY, Stephen LEATHER, Peter ROBINSON and Peter JAMES 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

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