Some time ago I read a story about an ambitious bank clerk who was recommended by his Line Manager to take up golf. He was advised that more business was done on golfing fairways and putting greens than in all the bank’s branch offices put together. So the determined young man bought a set of golf-clubs joined his local club and began to play regularly. At first he made many new friends, collected contacts and started to do good business with golfing partners and was even promoted at work - even his golf handicap improved. But then something dreadful happened: he became fanatical about the game. He began playing every moment he could and in all weathers. He talked about nothing else but golf. His friends soon became bored with him; his colleagues at work started to avoid him and his work and marriage hit the rocks. Eventually his wife left him and he was dismissed from the bank a quivering wreck of a man obsessed with dreaming about birdies, eagles and reducing his handicap.
It’s said that family history can be as addictive as golf only more so, and once bitten family historians are sometimes compared to driven beings who become obsessed with foraging around graveyards for headstone inscriptions, checking pedigrees and searching parish records. It’s common knowledge that family historians haunt record offices, libraries and burial grounds, and the more extreme bug-bitten victims soon become a bit like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who was compelled to relate his story to an endless audience forced to listen to his eternal ranting.
But on the plus side researching family history can be tremendously satisfying. Unravelling anyone’s family history is almost like reading a library, but it’s a library with an infinite number of books in it. There are mysteries and ‘brick walls’ (jargon for ‘can’t solve that problem’) around every corner and, of course, surprises. The Internet has made research much easier and BMDs (birth, marriage and death records) are widely and freely available. Census returns are on-line (for a fee) and the bigger libraries are jam-packed with family and local history resources.
The best way to start is by reading a good introduction to family history: The Family Tree Detective by Colin D Rogers is a good one as is Stella Colwell’s Teach Yourself Tracing Your Family Tree (published by Hodder & Stoughton at about £10). You could also consider joining a family history society like The Family History Society of Cheshire (whose research rooms and library is situated in Alderley Edge). But one thing is for sure: don’t make the mistake of thinking you can create a family tree dating back to William the Conqueror in just a few days or weeks. Most experienced family historians have been in the business for years and most of them have family trees going back just a few hundred years.
Family history is every bit as fascinating as any Conan Doyle story. The family historian becomes a bit like Sherlock Holmes seeking clues here and there and interpreting what’s found through the maze of history and fog of hermeneutics. One can never be sure how the story of one’s grandparents will unfold or what the end result of sending for a marriage certificate will be. While we can never be sure about anything in family history or our ancestor’s lives we can be certain that they loved and lived because how else did we come to be born?
Whether family history is a science or art there is one thing for sure: it’s addictive. Happy hunting!
Member of the Family History Society of Cheshire.