We all begin our Family History 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. 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 almost 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 when I started researching with a bit more methodology.
It wasn't all wasted effort, however, and I found myself with copies of
photographs the originals of which 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
new details, but had I not made such an early beginning in family history I
would have missed out on those stories completely.
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