My last grandparent died on Christmas Day 2018. I was lucky enough to have made it to my mid-30s and therefore got so spend a lot of time with grandparents through my life. My grandmother had dementia so the last 6 years or so of her life weren’t the same. After her death, my daughter asked me questions about her great-gran’s life as a child, and I regret to say, I couldn’t answer her questions. I approached my aunt who helped.
Last year, my mother-in-law, who had been researching her family for a while, asked me to provide details of my family so she could add my side of the family to her tree. At the time, I saw that I could get a month’s free subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, so I decided to see how much information I could find out myself and then pass it on to her. I found myself getting hooked on genealogy, and I spend hours while the children were at school just building up my tree as much as possible. My free month ended at the same time as the summer holidays began. I knew there was no point paying for a subscription when I had two children to entertain for 6 weeks, so I left it alone for a while.
I went back to it after the children had gone back to school. I paid for a subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, and a few other sites that I will come back to later, mainly because it can be very difficult to access many records without payment. There are some very good free sites if you can track down the correct ones for your area etc. I don’t profess to be any kind of expert in this field, I’m learning as I go along.
Over the next few months, up to Christmas 2019, I continued to research. The initial family tree I created in July was taken apart and started again, confirming more details than previously, ensuring that I wasn’t just following other people’s lines. On my father’s side, I originally managed to get such a long line of people that the only way I could view the tree as a whole was to create a large tree on the wall of my office (I printed off all the names and then stuck them in the right places with blue tack. After going back over the trees in more detail, some of these original details were found to be incorrect and there is one line that I can’t currently confirm as going back as far as I first thought. The picture below shows what’s left of it (part of it fell off, and I had to remove some incorrect names).
I will use this blog as a sort of personal diary for myself, on where I am up to with my own family, as well as information that I can give on sites I have used, any help that I can give to other people in the same situation etc. I would quite like all this information to be out there so that my own children can access it one day, so that they don’t have the same problem as me, and leave it too late to ask people in person.
It's all relative 