All thanks to my Mum

My mother had long tried to research the family history but resources were limited at that time, and she couldn't travel to check records, but corresponding with family members helped her a great deal. In about 2004 I found a family tree diagram amongst her papers together with a great many documents, certificates, notes, letters and unidentified photos. Previously I'd known few names further back than my grandparents and although my Mum spoke about her own aunts, uncles and cousins it didn't register with me who they were.

This sparked my interest and prompted me to download some software to my PC, enter the information I'd found and start searching. At that time my main resource was Family Search, and I'll forever be grateful to them for what I discovered, and FreeBMD and FreeCen were invaluable as well.

The family stories, many of which were intriguing, proved mostly to be fundamentally true and I'm very happy with and proud of my humble ancestors. Well, almost all of them! It's been wonderful to have been able to identify most of the photographs and have that sense of knowing those relatives to some extent, and finding out about their lives through various documents and newspaper articles has brought many of them to life for me. Distant cousins found have been enormously helpful too.

After subscribing for a while with Find My Past I settled on a sub to Ancestry a few years later and created my first of many on-line trees and learning so much about social history has been a bonus. The Lost Cousins newsletters, to which I eagerly look forward, have been enormously helpful too – thank you Peter! Although I keep my trees on Ancestry private I do enjoy helping genuine people and sharing info whenever I can and I'm pro-active on that.

I'm totally addicted! Our ancestors deserve to be remembered, they're why we're here.