I often think family history is a “seasonal” interest; almost a year ago, I took advantage of the warmer spring weather to visit Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, and it was a great chance to visit (and photograph) all sorts of churches, places and gravestones with links to those ancestors on my maternal side, but - as we all know - the British winter doesn’t really lend itself to outdoor genealogy trips . . .
It’s been a busy winter. I’ve completed a draft of a book about the teachers who worked at my former primary school, in my role as editor of the Ormskirk and District Family History Society’s magazine I’ve overseen the publication of a special extra-large Issue 75, and I’ve recently given my Who Do You Think You Are? talk to an audience for the very first time. That’s before I even start on my various research commissions.
I’ve been researching for other people for around six years now, and I’ve built up a lot of experience of different types of research; in this line of work, every enquiry is different, so variety is inevitable, but it has also given me a chance to evaluate what I do along the way.
Everyone finds their own particular skills, and can recognise work that particularly appeals to them, and after six years of research for other people I have discovered that my best results tend to come from enquiries relating to the period of history between 1600 and 1900 - there can be a bit of overlap there, depending on how good the available resources are (church records, wills etc) - but if I had to chose a particular timeframe of interest, that is the one that I’d choose.
So I’ve decided to refine the focus of my work to allow me to concentrate on enquiries relating to this period in time; through researching my own family tree, I have discovered all sorts of resources (such as land tax records, diaries from the seminaries where Catholic priests were educated and some fantastically detailed wills) that have improved my understanding of how my long-dead relations lived, worked and studied, and I hope to be able to use that knowledge to benefit my present and future customers, too.
Naturally, there will always be times when I can take on research that falls outside this period (for instance, if you have found a specific document reference using an online archives catalogue), so please feel free to get in touch if your enquiry falls into that category. I hope this will be a really positive change for my work, enabling me to concentrate on the subjects that I know best.