I've started this Blog to document the creation of this site, and the challenges in finding the details to document and confirm my family history.
In following the advice from other genealogists, I've started with me, and my immediate family, and worked back. I've tried to talk to as many family members as I can, with an emphasis on the elderly, to capture their memories before they are gone.
So for the moment I have started on the following family groups:
Paternal line: Benner - Phillips - Munro - Waters - Hunt - Ford - Angelsey - Heron - Hickson - Walter - Ball - Cawte - Worrell
Maternal Line: Maude - Ward - Kissling
There will be others added as I get time.
It's been a great learning curve, and a real challenge to work with partial information. A real live jig saw puzzle, with ittle bits coming in all the time, and the occasional gem as a group of details come in together, or something that confirms the links.
Any family tree with information past living memory is an exercise in probability. Without identity cards or an identity number, names are all we have to go on to track our ancestors lives. And as is fashion, names are replicated down the generations, leading to many duplicates and misinformation. There are also families who rewrite history to their own advantage. I've already broken one huge family "treasure", and expect there to be more.
The biggest treasure though is the truth, and the stories that come with it. The lives of our ancestors were a far cry from the relatively easy life we have now. I wonder if our gg-grandchildren will say that in their retrospective view. To allow them to do that I hope that this website and blog, and the associated documents become a digital time-capsule from which they will be better able to make that comment.