Researching & sharing the family tree
Family history can be a wonderful thing to share amongst generations. You can give your family a family tree, a bit like giving them a completed jigsaw!
Your family tree may intrigue you at the start and as you discover more and more, you can really find you take the bull by the horns and want to get to the root of your family and complete the family tree.
Researching the family tree is like solving a jig-saw puzzle
And for many people, the fascinating thing about researching their family history and putting a family tree together is that it becomes a real puzzle to solve. You can join up the dots and fill in the missing gaps – it can be a real challenge and give you something to really get stuck into as you work out how to solve problems and fill in any gaps in your family tree!
We were at home one day when the phone rang. Out of the blue, two relatives we didn’t even know we had were in our area, staying with a friend at her bed and breakfast. By the evening, we’d met them, two ladies who were researching the family tree and who had been looking for my grandfather’s grave and who were related to my father’s side of the family. We'd got two new relatives! They showed us the family tree they had put together so far and we were just astounded – they had managed to get back to the 15th century!
They had produced an incredible fabric of family history – a real weave of people, winding their way back over the centuries and what’s more, they had all the documentation they needed to prove all the births, marriages and deaths.
The funny thing was that we all went out for dinner and my mother was absolutely struck by how like my father the two ladies were. They had the same mannerisms, even the same laugh, the same way of thinking - it was quite incredible.
It was quite a discovery and it gave me a real sense of family roots, a sense of who we were and where we had come from. It showed the challenges various family members had faced over the centuries – literally – and what they would have lived through. It showed how some of them had moved around the country.
Build up a sense of history and how your family experienced it!
It was quite something to imagine my ancestors living throughout the past, and what their lives might have been like through the ages.
Sometimes I am tempted to delve into my mother’s side of the family – they are from Wales. But my great grandmother had 18 children and I have to confess to feeling somewhat daunted by the size of it all!
Researching the family tree can become a great hobby
A friend of mine has taken up the hobby of tracing her family history and she is absolutely loving it. She is utterly absorbed with it, and it has brought her into contact with new relatives she didn’t know she had and people she would never otherwise have met.
Once you get an inkling for delving into a life history, and start imagining what it would have been like to live in the times of the person(s) you’re researching, it can really take you on a journey.
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