The Journey begins or should I say continues!

  Thanks for joining me!

Now is as good a time as any to put my methods, thoughts and findings in writing.

There was a time when I was a child (many many moons ago) that I discovered a diagram of my family tree going back about 3 generations on my Mums side in the back of a very large notebook. This book had belonged to my Grandad Sid, then my Mum and then became mine. This tree had been started by my Grandad and subsequently added to by my Mum who got interested in her teens too.

Since those early times my Mum and I have spent more than 40 years following our shared interest, gradually using the latest resources and technology. At times it has been and still is a steep learning curve as just as you get used to a source of records or methodology, new ways of tracing your ancestors turn up.

When we started it was very much dependent upon learning about your ancestors from the oldest people in the family and as such some stories were such that you took them with a pinch of salt, others had a grain of truth but were invariably mixed up across generations and so to check the back story on these stories was very time consuming as it involved going to local records offices and plowing through paper records or looking at microfiche/film and making copious notes.

It was very important to try to record the source of each record found, this inevitably introduced errors as you would get home and find something was missing or unreadable because you got too excited with your findings.

Now so many records are available online, many not just transcriptions but actual documents that sometimes you can go back online and find those records which you missed the reference for and correct mistakes that you made over 20 years ago.

The latest aid to finding whether you are going in the right direction in creating your family tree is DNA, by finding shared matches that (you hope) have extensive trees, you can then confirm that you did in fact follow the correct Smith or Jones line back. Until of course you come across the dreaded “misattributed parent”, this could be because of adoption; a missing father; a cuckolded father; father/mother dying and remaining parent remarrying and the children being brought up by new parent. There are all sorts of reasons for a child not belonging to “parents” mentioned on census, birth and marriage records. These people are there to test our mettle, will we see through to the bitter end tracing who they really are? I would like to think that yes, I can do that, given enough time, data resources and inevitably money.