Still gasping for breath, so to take my mind off my rotten lungs and achy chest I spent a couple of hours on Ancestry poking about in other peoples family trees while Murphy snoozed on the router...
Don't know what Himself was doing...I could hear the strimmer, so I expect he was cutting something or other down.
I'm juggling three trees... not to mention my own which is a work in progress...I live in dread of adding some of the people on one tree to another one by mistake...would make it interesting I suppose... but awful confusing...especially if I put my Irish Grandfather on another tree...he changed his name at the drop of a hat.
Some trees are easy. All the records are there for the searching...other people have added precious family photographs...if they emigrated, there they are on the passengers lists...old Wills tell you what land they owned and which houses and give an insight to their lives from the items they left...pewter platters and oak chests...bed-linens and bed hangings.
You can sail back to the 1500's without a bother.
Read the Cambridge Alumni records and find sons with a degree in Law when they were fifteen...imagine them in long black gowns and cloaks with a sheaf of closely written upon parchments under their arms...scuttling towards their Chambers.
Find carefully transcribed Parish records of births and marriages...perhaps a Clandestine marriage held in a debtors prison presided over by a dubious member of the clergy...
Then there are the truly difficult trees.
People who ducked and dived...changing their name and evading the census...sometimes those elusive ones will suddenly pop up...often on a Criminal Record where they have a couple of aliases...but they'll lie about their place of birth or perhaps they don't recall where they were born...they have plain names...John Williams or Richard Smith. They've committed bigamy and have many children and no matter how careful I am with the searching I'm never quite sure whether the John or the Richard is the right one...
And there are trees I've begun for people and I've simply given up.
They'll argue the toss...my Grandfather wasn't a window cleaner they'll say...when the census clearly shows Grandpa being precisely that.
My Great Grandmother was Irish...she wasn't actually. She was born in Hampshire...had English parents and Grandparents...
Uncle John certainly didn't have twelve children...he clearly has twelve children on three census records...
Other trees I've quietly forgotten about are those where the person is simply not interested...I send them reams of records and hear nothing back. Not even an acknowledgement...so I peep over the parapet and ask did they find the information interesting...? And get an 'oh yes'...
Stuff them...they can do the rest themselves.
But delving into the past is what I do...I find such tantalising information sometimes which makes me Google for more...for instance I found a young man who married when he was twenty. He was a sailor on a Frigate which sailed from Brazil in South America...I looked up the Frigates name on the net and that led me to an account written first hand by the Captain of that Frigate...a tale of unpaid wages and almost mutiny...of the skirmishes fought while in Brazil...the constant threat of losing his crew to Yellow Fever and Syphilis...the meagre rations and the longing to set foot on dry land once more.
The poor man who died in a Lunatic Asylum in the late 1800's...he was there at the same time as the man suspected of being Jack the Ripper...it was a truly appalling place. Over five thousand patients with few staff...the favourite method of keeping those who were considered to be a danger to themselves or others was a type of cage with a lockable lid...
Those people mean that we have our lives today...without the man who died in 1530 and left a Ewe to his servant...there is someone alive today who wouldn't have otherwise existed. If the young sailor hadn't married a local girl while on leave from the Frigate...generations would be lost.
Makes you think doesn't it.
