One evening last summer I was watching Annie Lennox on "Who do you think you are? " and wondered for the umpteenth time what it would be like to research my own family tree. With a bit of time on my hands. I decided that it was time to stop wondering and start searching. So I signed up for a free trial on Ancestry and I was off.
I am not sure that if I had known how addictive it would quickly become whether I would have done it all, but before I knew it, it was too late and I was well and truly hooked.
Around Christmas time I realised that simply adding to list of a names in a sort of " how far back can you go?" way wasn't going to be very satisfying and that if I was to really make the most of what is out there, I needed to learn to do it properly. I took a look at the courses available and decided that the one which suits me best is the correspondence course run by the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury.
Almost every day brings some new development, another name or piece of information, a snippet of local history or a contact from someone who is researching some distant common ancestor. This blog is a piece of self indulgence on my part, a record of the progress I make, the obstacles I find and hopefully how they are overcome.
I want to share this work, and hear from other people with the same madness. So if you do want to contribute to the blog, feel free, but please keep it polite and stick to family history.
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