If you are considering becoming a member of Digest Family History, the following lists some of the records we currently have available in our members area:

• Family Tree:
• Individuals: 12,977
• Families: 2,754
• Unique Surnames: 1,075
• Photographs: 21
• Memorial Stones: 996 (of which 555 include a photograph)
• Marriage Records: 3,044 comprising;
• Christ Church, Knottingley: 659
• St. Andrew, Ferrybridge: 500
• St. Botolph, Knottingley: 500
• St. Giles, Pontefract: 1,283
• Ropewalk Methodist Church: 102
• Burial Records: 3,414 (Searchable by name, year or grave number) comprising;
• Knottingley Cemetery: 2,442 (from 11 Apr 2005 back to 1970)
• Ferrybridge Cemetery: 682 (from 4 Apr 2005 back to 4 Jul 1975)
• Wesleyan Burial Ground: 290
• Wooden Sailing Ships:
• Knottingley Built: 163

In addition we now have 42 local inquest reports and our article section which currently features The Carter Family and Lime Grove.

The majority of our marriage records include the names of both the bride and grooms father together with his occupation - which is a great help with your research. Additional records are added to our databases on a regular daily basis.

For full details of the Digest Family History website you can visit our Digest Family History Home Page where you will also find information about how you can become a member and gain access to all our records and information.

Although it is possible to begin compiling your family history with access to the very minimum amount of information, you can never have enough of it. Even the most insignificant piece of news can be of use to you in some way. Take, for example, copies of old newspapers. Apart from the stories they contain, which can often provide the lead you are looking for, the majority of these published works contain a 'Births, Marriages, Deaths and Obituaries' column and these have proved invaluable to me over recent days. As an example I will relate a brief account of Edwin Senior Atkinson, solicitor, of Knottingley.

I have not yet located the 1861 census for Edwin, but the 1871 census shows him with his wife Harriette and their two children born in 1862 and 1865. Likewise, the 1881 census records Edwin and Harriette as husband and wife. Edwin married Harriet Oxley in 1858 and upon her death in 1904 Harriet was buried in the cemetery at Knottingley alongside her husband who had earlier died in 1886. However, the Harriet buried with him at Knottingley was not the Harriet that Edwin married in 1858.

From a newspaper I discovered that Edwin Senior Atkinson was twice married and that both his wives were called Harriet. His first wife died in 1866 and Edwin re-married in 1869.

You can never have enough information to hand so don't discount anything, however insignificant it might at first appear. Even if the information you are looking for isn't referenced, there is a possibility that it could enable you to discount another of your theories.

Digest Family History now contains its own message board inside our members area which is for the exclusive use of members only. Everyone who uses our message board will therefore have at least one common interest with yourself and it should prove invaluable with your family history research. Make our message board your first stop when searching for information and post your first message right away. If you just want to chat about anything, no matter what the subject, then you can do that too. In addition, our message board includes its own integrated messaging system so you can contact other members without having to use an e-mail program. Just another way that Digest Family History can make researching local family histories that little bit easier and make it a whole lot more entertaining.

I apologise if you were unable to access the Family History website last night. In fact the problem with our hosts servers affected all our websites and I was in the middle of working on the Pontefract website when the whole lot went down. Service was resumed early this morning, by which time you would most likely have been fast asleep but me, here I am at almost 4am trying to complete the work I had started earlier before calling it a day.

I will resume work on the Family History database later today as my work on the Knottingley and Pontefract websites has meant I have had no time to spare over the past two or three days. I'll try make it up to you!

Since early this morning I have been transferring the Knottingley website onto a new server but in-between uploading sections of the site I have continued to add more burial records from Knottingley cemetery and have now completed as far back as 1971.

When I first decided to compile the database of burials I knew that I would be in for some hard work when it came to those records from the early part of the 1900s and back into the nineteenth century. What I hadn't foreseen was how difficult it would be to make sense of some of the more recent records. Using a combination of on-screen enlargements and a hand held magnifier upon printed copies I am confident that the majority of the records completed to date are accurate but I am astonished that many recent register entries are barely legible.

Between 1971 and 1978 the registers accommodated just 8 entries per page and there is ample space within which to enter the burial details but blow me if the person responsible hasn't gone and written as small as possible making it extremely difficult to make sense of many of the entries. The writing is so small that the individual characters are not even formed. What's more amazing is the number of instances where even the most simple guidelines haven't been followed and details have been entered into the wrong boxes making it appear that certain very unfortunate people were buried alive! - dying a few days later I might add. For a register that was updated on average with no more than a couple of lines per week I'm simply flabbergasted that so little care and attention was given to it and that the task of numerically incrementing the register entry number by a single digit couldn't always be followed correctly.

There are bound to be some errors in the database I have compiled from the register entries for which I apologise to those concerned and so I would ask that you inform me of any that you might find so that I can correct them as quickly as possible.