Every Family has a story to tell……….Welcome to mine
At the start of the Great War the population of Byford in Herefordshire, including children, was 148 and Mansell Gamage 116, giving a total of 264 inhabitants. 51 young men enlisted from the two villages and 13 of those sadly died. The others returned, but life would never be the same for any of them, … Continue reading A Family at War (Part 2)
For those of you that enjoy a good genealogy podcast series, then why not have a listen to The Journeys Into Genealogy Podcast by the delightful Emma Cox. This week Emma interviewed me on all things genealogy related. We discussed how I became interested in genealogy myself, how I became the writer of the Dear … Continue reading Journeys Into Genealogy Podcast
It's a simple enough question, you have found your family in all the census returns and you have captured every birth, death and marriage for your ancestors, but have you discovered everything there is to find out about them? The census returns only give you a quick snapshot of what the family were doing; in … Continue reading What Did Our Ancestors Do Between The Census Years?
That's it, I have finally made it to the end, this is the last of sixteen blogs telling the life stories of my 2x great-grandparents! The very fact that Elizabeth McCormack is the very last one, will tell you that Elizabeth's story was maybe a little harder to tell, than some of the others, primarily … Continue reading The Incredible Journey………….
It's probably something that we don't really want to think about, our own death, but sadly as we get older there is an inevitability about it, it's that moment when you realise, "hang on a minute, I have lived more years than I have actually got left", that's when you begin to think about the … Continue reading What Will Happen When I Become a Death Certificate?
Every once in a while you stumble across a story, almost by accident and you wonder how on earth have I missed that! Well recently I did just that, whilst doing some random searches on the newspaper archives section of the FindMyPast website. It was while I was revisiting some old searches, that I found … Continue reading Was She Pushed? Did She Jump? Or Did She Fall?
I am almost at the end of an extremely long and incredibly amazing journey, documenting the lives of all sixteen of my 2 x great-grandparents, this will be the fifteenth in the series and the last few have been the most challenging to research, due to a variety of reasons. This was one of those … Continue reading Not Just Your Run of the Mill Story
Over the last few years, I’ve been steadily working my way through writing the biographies of my eight great-grandparents and my sixteen 2× great-grandparents. It’s been a hugely rewarding process, but as anyone who blogs about family history will know, there comes a point where you pause, look up from the research, and think: what next? … Continue reading When All You Need is a Little ‘Prompt’
My good friend Kelly Wheaton recently wrote a really thought provoking blog about how she first became interested in researching her family history and the reasons why she started on her family history journey, the link to Kelly's blog can be found here; What Got You Started in Genealogy Kelly also asked her friends to … Continue reading How It Started, How It’s Going……….
It feels somewhat strange setting these goals for 2022, whilst we are living with so much uncertainty in our day to day lives, but all I/we can do, is try and maintain a sense of normality, whatever normality is and try to maintain some kind of perspective with life. With that in mind I have … Continue reading New Year, New Goals
The Chiddicks Family Tree 