Following on from this week’s earlier post, I’ve moved on a little bit, and added VB6 to the mix!
I discovered (thanks to the LostCouins.com newsletter) that the English death indices listed the deceased’s date of birth on deaths from 1969. This was a new piece of information I thought could be useful. I already have the year of birth and year of death in the database, so I used the methods previously described to call up a search for the record. I now added a further step – I found a way to “click” on the search button from the macro, so bringing up the list of individuals matching the name (usually just one, but there’s always an exception). Selecting the appropriate record by manually clicking brings up the data, dragging the mouse selects the useful text and finally Control+C sends that text to the clipboard.
I now revived a technique I had used before and had a VB6 programme running which monitored the clipboard, and when its content changed wrote the data to a file. It’s very complicated, and needs several brain cells to keep track of what’s going on.
Despite being ever so much easier than doing it all manually, I’ve still got bored with the process, so I’ll see whether the new data is actually useful when I merge what I’ve done so far into the database.
One final thought – one of the individuals whose death I processed in this way was my father – it was a bit spooky thinking “that data is there because I was the one who registered that death”.
Andy Micklethwaite's Family History Blog 