52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 1 - Beginning

We all begin our research at various times in our lives and for various reasons.  For me, family history research began quite early, when I was just 16.  History was my favourite subject at school, and when I picked up a book on genealogy in my local library, I was hooked immediately and started asking my parents loads of questions, the bulk of which they couldn't answer.

I am still surprised by how little my parents knew about their families and even their parents, especially my father.  He didn't know much, and both his parents had passed away, his mother before I was born and his father when I was very young.  What was his mother's maiden name?  No idea.  "Never came up", he said.  His grandparents names?  Dates and places?  He knew very little other that that his parents had married in England before moving to Australia, and his father came from Essex.  So Dad's elder siblings were my best source of information, and I wrote numerous letters over the next few years.  Looking back I realise how much easier it is today, with the internet, online records and email providing fast - sometimes immediate - answers.  Beginning my research back in the 1980's was a much slower process, especially as with Dad's side of the family I was researching overseas immediately.

My mother's side of the family was both harder and easier.  My maternal grandmother was still alive when I started my research and she was a wonderful source of information, although again her knowledge of details was rather hit and miss.  She came from another big family, one of a dozen children with a couple of half siblings as well.  Having that extra generation to question made starting my research much easier, as well as the fact that my maternal ancestors had been in Victoria, Australia for a few generations.  It was when I went back further that life got harder - my paternal ancestors are all English, but on the maternal side I have Irish, Scottish and German as well, and I quickly discovered these could be harder to trace.  My one year of high school German was not much help at all with deciphering old handwritten German records.

Looking back, I can also see the many mistakes and research errors I made during those early years.  I was still in High School, I had done no training in Genealogical research methods, and basically made it all up as I went along, recording details as I uncovered them haphazardly in a series of notebooks.  I accepted family stories and legends as completely correct, I didn't record where I found a number of documents, and a couple of times I incorrectly assumed a family relationship based on data that fit 'well enough' and spent months chasing a family that wasn't actually related.  Much of the work I did back then had to be redone years later and started researching with a bit more methodology.

It wasn't all wasted effort, however, and I found myself with copies of photographs that have since disappeared, and with notebooks full of stories and memories of family members who have since passed away.  In several cases VERIFYING those stories exposed inaccuracies or added details, but had I not made such an early beginning in family history I would have missed out on those stories completely.