Red Leaf

Welcome to my blog. I have started this blog as a means of sharing my family ancestry and with a wider goal of promoting genealogical research and discussion.

I caught the bug two years ago, after a lengthy conversation with my grandfather. We talked about the family in some detail, and it soon became apparent that he knew very little of his own family history. I discovered that there were some large sections of our family history that were still unknown or in the least knew very little about, and so I decided that I would try to find out what I could. Fortunately, a great deal of material was available as a starting point, including photographs and a number of documents, all of which had been passed on to my grandfather when his sister had died. The task of researching and compiling a family history was much more user friendly experience than it had been for my own father, who had done much of the leg work by hand, leafing through card indexes visiting the Public Records Office (as it was then known) and spending countless hours staring at a microfiche screen. My good fortune and that of many people who undertake this kind of project is that the internet is now at the forefront of our lives, all of this information has now been presented in such a way that it is now available at our finger tips. It has made it possible for those who live remotely and do not have access to the establishments that house archive material to carry out research from the comfort of their own homes. This is not to say that there is not a place for “manual research”, certainly much satisfaction can be derived from the “Journey” of information finding. My own view is that one of the most satisfying aspects of any kind of genealogical research is talking to people, getting your hands dirty and feeling like you have earned the reward of finding that missing piece of the jigsaw.