maandag 5 januari 2009

A B C along - A is for Ancestry dot Com!

If you read my blog you will know of my interest in family history. I’ve been researching and recording the family tree using www.ancestry.com as my main reference source and data store, and am amazed to discover I have been a member since November 2004!
There is a part of me that loves the minutiae of fact finding. It used to surprise me when I completed personality tests for work or training, to find a suitable career path would have been the police force (especially as personality tests completely omit physical characteristics, and I would have been an exceedingly vertically challenged police officer!), but detective work is appealing, and probably why I made my career auditing and accounting for twenty odd years.
With family history, I get to bust family myths as I find facts relating to long dead relatives lives. My confession is I too am guilty of generating my own myths as I slip backwards in time with an ancestor and start to imagine what life would have been like as a ballast keel man on the river Tyne in the middle of the nineteenth century, or as a barwoman in a pub down on North Shields quayside during the first World War.
My family tree has over fourteen hundred people in it, and I wonder whether it is time to stop now, and move on to another hobby, but ordered a copy of a marriage certificate before christmas, and have a list of other documents I need to find which I feel would help raise the veil on part of my great, great, grandfathers life, and once that veil is raised? Who knows where I will be off to next!

Geen opmerkingen: