Now that the weather is no longer warm and sunny and the temperature has dropped to single figures what better time to start investigating your Family History in the comfort of your own home. These days a great deal can be done by sitting at your computer and utilising the vast number of records which are now online. As an example, one morning in a couple of hours I helped a friend’s nine-year-old daughter trace some of her family back into the seventeen hundreds. Whilst in some cases it may be necessary to pay to use some of these resources, compared with what it used to cost when one had to visit individual Record Offices to look up the records which they held, the outlay is not excessive. As a starter, Free BMD provides free access to index records of births, marriage and deaths for England and Wales. This resource is ideal for those beginning their family history.
Joining a Family History Group can add to your experience by giving you the opportunity to share your finding with others of similar interests and also help in getting suggestions of how to remove “brick walls” when you appear to have reached a dead end. It also means that you don’t necessarily have to bore your own family with your findings if they are initially not very interested. Many people are surprised to find that even though their ancestors were Agricultural labourers (ag. labs in the jargon) they can appear in local newspapers for a multitude of reasons and many of these publications have been digitised and are now online. Tracing your families is better than reading a detective novel and can have just as many twists and turns with the added advantage that one never needs to run out of people to investigate as the number of people involved, even if just tracing direct ancestors, doubles every generation.
I do hold the Licentiateship of the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies which means I have a reasonable overview of the major sources available to researchers and over the years I have gained experience in helping people build up their family trees. At our meetings members bring any issues they are grappling with and also share their successful findings which we all celebrate.
If you are interested in giving it a go, my Merton U3a Family History group meets monthly on a Thursday afternoon for a couple of hours. Why not come and give it a try?

Venue:  Cannon Hill area - !64 bus to St. James’ Church or 413 to Cherrywood Lane or Northway. Unrestricted parking.