Welcome to my first attempt at telling you a bit more about what I do and why I do it . . . after all, we all have to start somewhere, and nowhere is that more true than when trying to discover exactly what your ancestors did.
Perhaps my gran is responsible for my obsession with family history? I know I was keenly interested in the subject back in 1998, when I wasn’t quite fourteen. She was the only person who knew anything much about my paternal ancestors and, although one or two birthplaces turned out to be wrong, in each case there was a family link to the places where her mother and her mother-in-law were from!
I think my ancestors would be astonished if they could see how easy it is to find out about them online today . . . my great-great-great-grandad might be a bit sheepish about the “interesting” discovery that he went to prison twice. (Embezzling money and . . . well, stealing three chickens, if you’re interested.) Yet those unexpected stories help to build up a great idea of an ancestor's personality. Some appear from nowhere and others disappear without trace, but those extra little nuggets of information - whether it’s a prize for the best dahlias in a horticultural show, a hint that a relative was godmother to their new nephew or a newspaper report of an inquest into their death - stop those people from being a mere name on a census record.
Like most researchers, I know more about some subjects than others - personally, I prefer to specialise in searches that concentrate on Lancashire people in the pre-1900 period, and I’m really interested in Catholic records (largely because my initial motivation for some early research was to find baptism records that were not on the internet) - but that’s not to say that I haven’t learned skills and expanded my knowledge over time.
One task involving the records for Lancaster Asylum fascinated me so much when I realised that many case notes had photographs of the patients attached to them that I was prompted to check my own personal research; suspicions confirmed, I returned to Preston, and discovered a photograph of my own great-great-grandfather, who died there in 1903. It was a very strange moment, but it answered a lot of questions, too.
I love the fact that every single request for help is totally different. Even if I search the same set of records or view the same map twice, my purpose will be unique; I’ve studied an 1840s tithe map to find out who lived at a particular house that year so that I could trace them on a census, only to return to the same document a year later to see whether another person had taken over a local inn before a particular date.
To me, family history is an ongoing project. I am not sure whether anyone would dare to say that their family tree was “finished”, although some circumstances (missing or damaged church records and relations who managed to evade the census) mean that some answers just cannot be found, so I try to work on the philosophy that sometimes research is “as complete as it can be”. I think that’s especially true of those confusing people in the family tree who aren’t quite sure how old they are or were said to be born in a region or country (such as “Yorkshire” or “Wales”) because the census enumerator didn’t want to attempt to spell the name of a town or village.
Occasionally, the story of a distant relative can be so interesting that I can’t help but want to share it with others. If you have a browse through my History Talks page, you’ll find a current list of the presentations that have been inspired by the strange, surprising and - occasionally - strange things that I’ve encountered in my personal and professional work. My current goal is to keep sharing them with any groups who want to hear them, and I hope to be doing that for a long time to come . . .