Bill visited the BBC bus in Aspatria to find out the answer to a couple of IT queries, and ended up telling us all about how he got into computers and why his wife's poems and his family's support inspired him to delve into his family history and archive his life's story. His wife, Betty, died in 2001, leaving a chasm, so after a while he felt a need to re-invent himself to enable himself to move on.  | | Bill fishing |
He went about this by following two new interests, one of which was fly fishing. He enjoyed this immensely and also provided his neighbours with a good supply of trout as a bonus. His second new interest started when his family encouraged him to enter the world of computers. Following Betty's death, he had discovered amongst her belongings, a substantial set of about 60 poems which she had written. He was acutely aware that his great grandchildren had only pictures and verbal stories of their great grandmother whom they had never known. Therefore, he wanted to put all the poetry onto the computer. From this, Bill organised for a website to be created of all her work - the link can be found on the right hand side of this page. The next stage for Bill was to create a book containing all the poems. He felt that this printed document would be the family heirloom. This was quite a learning curve for him from an IT point of view, but his determination saw him through. And as anyone who works with computers can relate to this, having found out how to do something specific, he often forgot how he had done it! However, not one to shy away from personal development, he then moved onto working with digital photographs of his family which he included in the book. Backed by the support and encouragement of his family, he then went on to write Betty's biography. This included a lot of photos from the 1920's, taken by her father when she was young.  | | Bill at his computer |
Not content to stop there, Bill responded to his grandson’s keen interest in Bill's own life story by documenting that. He has found that during this process of learning the techniques of research using the internet, he has unearthed some fantastic information to support his writings. His document includes a fascinating story about the day he met the Queen of Greece in a ship's sick bay whilst serving in the Royal Navy. Bill's perseverance with learning a new skill has furnished his family with some great documents of his and his wife's lives, including some family history research. What will Bill's thirst for development lead him to do next...? | 
