I’ve started to talk more about family history and ancestry a lot more, highlighting my growing interest. But it wasn’t always this way.
When my parents were doing their own family history research, I just wasn’t interested in it at all. I found all their discoveries quite boring, along with their traipsing to the archive centre and finding it interesting to go to graveyards. Goodness me, how much has changed.
There was a first inkling of interest when my parents found and got in contact with my mother’s half brothers in Canada. I can’t remember exactly when this was, but it must have been either in the late 90s or early 2000s. My Canadian grandfather had gone back to Canada before my mum was born, with the express plan of getting my mum, aunt and grandmother over there soon after. Things didn’t quite work out, and the women in my family ended up staying in London after a divorce, and then my grandfather remarried and had two more children.
None of us met my grandfather, but we were all lucky enough to meet his sons and granddaughter. And this Canadian connection is a reason why mum and I have applied for Canadian citizenship.
I think my dad was always the main driver of family tree research, and it was hard when we lost him in 2017.
Over the years, he and mum had amassed a huge amount of folders, files, notebooks and random papers full of family history research. We always thought it would be my sister who took on the research role. But no, it’s come to me – and I couldn’t be more grateful. Even now, behind me where I type, there lay about 12 folders full of notes my dad had made on his side of the family. I find handwritten notes, most of which I have no idea what they relate to or who, but seeing these help me feel closer to him. He was always a note-taker. He used to write practice letters of letters he was planning to write; and I seem to have inherited many of these practice letters.
I think it was in early 2018 that I started building an online tree, and in my enthusiasm, I seem to have accepted any going hints meaning that I have thousands of people in the tree. And many who aren’t blood related. Imagine: the aunt of the mother-in-law of the father of the husband of your 4th cousin 6 times removed. Not particularly helpful. Potentially interesting, but not helpful.
It’s also proved to me that finding sources is essential; and not sources that only rely on other people’s trees or even an online collaboration of trees, which more often than not, have incorrect information, leading you in to a whole wrong direction.
Over the last few months, I’ve been ‘pruning’ the tree; eliminating unnecessary people – acknowledging they exist, but they don’t belong on my tree; finding true sources for people who don’t have any (an ongoing project); deleting any decorative images that mean nothing; and pinpointing where the evidence stops and where potential imagination begins – and removing (but keeping a note of) unverified people. The latter generally tends to be from hundreds of years ago.
Once I’m happy with the pruning, I can then get into researching and recreating the stories of my ancestors.
And I love it.