It's horribly addictive you know...searching for ancestors...I sit here hunched over the keyboard thinking I'll just look that person up and find they have a story...one chap I found today in the Quaker family I'm researching for a friend, was killed during the Monmouth Rebellion...his wife promptly threw herself down the well...seems a bit drastic actually. Their ghosts can be seen wandering around the small village they lived in...and the dog. The dog gave his master away to the troops you see...probably barked at them.
And I didn't know the Quakers year began, not in January, but in March...so when they baptised babies in the eleventh month it would have been February...
They were meticulous with their record keeping which makes finding ancestors a breeze...some even gave causes of death...all too often it was smallpox or typhus. But that rather depended upon who was writing out the actual records...some give very brief details, others mention adults occupations and the names of their parents.
Another snippet I found out today, was a Quaker family who sailed in what is generally known as the William Penn fleet, they took vast amounts of goods with them...hundredweights of iron nails...yards and yards of rough woollen cloth...jars of dyestuffs and axes and hammers and other tools...it was all to be distributed among the families once they'd landed.
And the sailing ships were so small...the Welcome was 150 feet long...she had 102 passengers and the crew on board...a third of the passengers and crew succumbed to smallpox on the voyage...bearing in mind most of those families...if not all...would have taken some of their furniture and personal belongings and you begin to see how incredibly cramped they must have been. The Welcome took 54 days to reach America...
Unfortunately her ships log was lost, so we can't be certain about the people on board and whether or not there was enough food and fresh water to last for the voyage.
Servants who travelled with the families were under a four year indenture...after that time had been served they were given 50 acres of land and enough timber to build themselves a log cabin...
Of course a family tree is never really completed...there are all those cousins six times removed and their wives, who might just have fascinating stories to tell of leaving their best bed to a favourite daughter or a milch cow to their brothers child.
Records which tell of enlistment in Armies that give physical descriptions of your second cousin twice removed...five foot ten with blue eyes and brown hair...forefinger missing from right hand...scar on stomach and a mole behind the right ear...of stocky build...cannot read or write.
Those details flesh out the people who came before...from a series of dates which mean little in themselves there emerges real people who loved and laughed and sorrowed just like you do...
Researching Other Peoples Family Trees...Has Pitfalls
Saga hols 
