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My Approach to Family History
My interest in family history began as a child while listening to family stories, finding old letters and documents tucked in between pages of a family bible and looking at photos of dead ancestors. More recently, I began researching and documenting my ancestors using traditional genealogical tree diagrams and gedcom files, but I never saw these processes as ends in themselves. Rather, I regard them as a necessary preliminary – aides memoirs – to the writing of family narratives. My interests are in the histories of my ancestors rather than tracing my lines back to Adam! Specifically, I am fascinated with the period from about 1700 to just after the First World War. Personal recollections of more recent events are included but I am concerned to protect living relatives. Because of this, my narratives begin with my great grandparents and will work backwards from them. Similarly, the direct descendant trees shown here end with my four grandparents.
When I look at my tree, I see lots of names, dates and places, merging and splitting. I’m there towards the bottom. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. They were once alive like me and I do not want to reduce them to outline births, marriages and deaths and census data. Their stories can only ever be partially told because few of them wrote or spoke about their lives. They were mostly ‘ordinary’ working people – agricultural workers, miners and domestic servants – who very rarely appear in historical documents.
In an attempt to get some understanding of what it was like for them to live there and then, I have used social and local histories and visited many of their places. The resulting narratives are my efforts to give my ancestors a social and historical context: to give some impression of their social lives, their work, their communities, their interests and their homes in their times. Those shown here are a beginning and they will be added to at regular intervals.
Sources
I live in a remote part of the UK and can only visit libraries, archives and records centres occasionally. I have, therefore, had to make use of a wide range of online resources. Amongst those that I have found most useful are:
Websites:
General UK:
Maps:
Scotland:
Wales:
English Counties:
Pay to view:
Occupations:
Family History Societies:
Social and Local History sources:
I am currently preparing a detailed list which I will put here. A general list of UK sources can be found at http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,163836.0.html
Ethical Issues
I am concerned with protecting the privacy of living relatives and have not included names or photographs of them here. For a discussion of these issues, see
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/%7Ecregan/privacy.htm
All content on this site is copyright © jmp, 2006 unless otherwise stated.
Thanks
I am grateful to the many people who have helped me in my research: family, friends, librarians, archivists and fellow family historians. I have not mentioned them by name here both in case I offend anyone by not including them and to keep within the ethical guidelines which I have followed for this project.
I am also grateful to William Sinclair and Sons, makers of red Silvine exercise books, who generously offered me two new books and the image to replace the one I lost.
This site was designed using Net Objects Fusion 9.
Contact
If you have any queries or comments, please email me
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