Ok, so I’ll be honest, curiosity killed the cat.
My wife’s cousin told me several years ago that she was researching her family tree. Having been recently made redundant I had become very, very bored.
So, sat in front of my computer and I built all I knew about my family, with help from Dad and my Aunt. So my tree had my parents, grandparents and great grandparents.
I love puzzles and this was a tough one but with so many online records of births, deaths and marriages and the 1841 to 1901 Census's (or should that be Censi??) I found many direct ancestors back to the early 1700s.
Now you can easily do this yourself. Look at my resources page (coming soon!).
But I was one of the lucky few who strike gold. There, in the early 1700s, an ancestor married into the Seymour family and I found I wasn’t just doing the family tree, I was now heading into history. The aristocracy seems very good at leaving records and people like Mr John Burke and his Burke's Peerage etc have gathered masses of information that suddenly brings you into a whole new era.
I travelled back from the 1700s, through the middle ages and on into the cusp of the dark ages. Such was my fascination that, several years on from my cousin-in-law (I can hear the slapping of hundreds of Genealogist's foreheads, “Surely he knows it is his 2nd cousin twice removed and turned inside out” but you know what I mean!) I am completely addicted to finding more and more ancestors, and I have at last realised that history CAN be interesting (with apologies to my history teacher at school).
I have learned so much, that it seems churlish not to share my mistakes, shocks and surprises.
So join me as I get skeletons out of the cupboard and give them a good dusting down. Who knows where this will take us?
