My Own Introduction To Genealogy:

I can't remember exactly when I first took more than a passing interest in my family tree. Like most kids, I had from time to time spoken to my parents about family members, from both my mothers and fathers sides of the family. 

They often mentioned various names of people that I did not know and recanted vague memories of the odd interesting event. There was even a rumour of the existence of a family bible which was supposed to contain names and dates. But for various reasons, apart from making some mental notes, I did not actively pursue learning about my families relationships.

From time to time things would happen. Such as when my grandmothers sister appeared in the local newspaper celebrating her one hundredth birthday. My mother actually thought that she had died many years before. 

This time my interest was piqued and I went to meet her. She had a very good memory and was full of lots of anecdotal information. The main one being that she never got along with my maternal grandfather. However, as was the norm in those days she did not want to talk about the reason for her dislike. However, she provided me with a potted history of her own and my grandmothers early life.

On another occasion I was triggered into doing a bit more research, by a friends throw away remark about his dog having a longer pedigree than his own. Its true, we do seem to take much more of an interest in our pets dogs pedigree, than we care to do about our own.

Much later, I started to take much more of an interest and I spent many hours in various local public records offices. Also visiting and joining local family history groups. I even did a course at Sheffield University on local history. But I did enjoy researching and delving into official documents and records.

Now there are other programs on television such as the BBC's 'Who do You Think You Are' where a celebrities family history is explored in an hour-long program. However, siting and watching someone trawl through on and off-line genealogical records would be very boring. So there is always, plenty of travel and arranged meetings with people who are specialist in a given historical context. 

Over the years since I first started, much has changed. Many of the public paper records have now been microfilmed and have since been digitised. Now many of the more important documents written in Secretary Hand have now been transcribed into modern more readable character sets.

Now you can do a great deal of family history research on-line from your arm chair using a computer. There is no need to travel around the country visiting public records offices. Though it is still interesting to go and look at the streets and sometimes even the buildings where your ancestors lived. However, today the on-line digital world now has Google maps which will let you look on-line at street level. Though you can also consult recently digitised maps which were drawn at the time period of interest.

Later....