ancestors

In the mid 1980s I began checking where I had come from. On the male line I made swift progress back through the Victorian era but hit a brick wall at 1800. Since then I have amused myself instead by looking into the ancestry of the dozens of female lines that married into my family. Even though their families are not related to me by blood they are just as much fun to trace! This is such a good hobby for putting down and picking back up a few months or years later. After all, these people are patient, they aren't going anywhere! The photo is a wedding in 1928.

I recently revisited my genealogy files where there are eight hundred and sixty two names, some living but mostly dead, in my database. More than ever, I would love to time travel back two hundred years and talk to some of them. Their lives were so different from our own. No cars, no electricity, no street lights, no microwaves, no refrigerators, no reality TV and no space stations. Yet I am sure they had the same hopes and dreams and fears as us.

I want to pass an electronic family history file to my descendents to hand from generation to generation. Not just names, dates, events and places but my hopes and dreams and fears. Ten years ago I finished writing the first instalment in the story of my life. I think it is time to add another few chapters.