Chicken Divan
A few years back a cousin sent my mother some family history information and asked her if she could fill in any of the gaps. I could see some errors in her list, so I volunteered to provide the information. I had a colleague who was into genealogy and he directed me to a couple of sources.
I had never been interested in pursuing my family history, being a firm believer in the philosophy that we are who we make ourselves, not who our ancestors were.
However, as I sorted out the information for my mother's cousin - and it really was quite simple - curiosity got the better of me and I decided to look up a name here, a name there. Suddenly I was hooked. Since then I have built up a database of more than 5000 names. During a lull in my own research I decided to do The Spouse's side.
Some bits of research come easily. Other's take months of digging. There are brick walls that refuse to crumble. There are the proverbial skeletons in the closet. And there are the great moments when a long-sought piece of vital informational suddenly drops into place.
There is a lot of detective work involved. Sometimes hard-won research has to be discarded because I have been barking up the wrong family tree. However, one of the marvelous spin-offs is finding myriad cousins I didn't know I had.
The Internet has certainly led to a huge upsurge in the number of people researching their roots. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email from some part of the globe from someone inquiring if their Graham or Jones or Churchill or McDougall or Daubeny might be the same family as mine.
I store all the information on my computer and that, too, has certainly made things easier than the days when information was entered in copious notebooks and files. They still exist, of course, but it is so much easier locating a piece of information in a database, or finding out that John in England is my seventh cousin and so on.
One of the interesting facts the computer threw up today was that the average age span is 56 years 6 months and the earliest birth date I have recorded is that of my 7xgreat grandfather, Angel Eatwell who was born in Yatesbury, Wiltshire in 1679.
I was delighted to discover the name Eatwell in the ancestry. I must come from a long line of people who enjoyed their food.
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