Can't See The Wood For The Tree...

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This chasing down your family history thing is bloody hard work: simultaneously fascinating and frustrating: the main problem being that working-class families leave so few traces of their being behind; and the faint traces they do leave are often false trails, for pretty much always expedient means. I know first hand that my father's family often had to do a 'moonlight flit' if the next rent payment was outside their meagre means: a hand-cart borrowed from kindred spirits pressed into service to charge through the night to some other billet. Mixed fortunes have been the defining characteristic of my life: I guess 'as above, so below...'

I've been making some progress in locking down my great-great-grandparent's to place and time: I have enough solid evidence, personal knowledge and photographs of my great-grandparents to give me some certainty about the information I've gleaned about them, and encouragingly, it all so far leads to agreeing with the family tree I got from my dad and his distant cousins on the other side of the world. It's looking good, but this line of the family is just the one single line I'm currently investigating. In itself this is a mind-f**k; as to the rest, it's just bloody exponential...

Comments

  1. Anonymous9 July 2023 at 06:47

    I find the main problem is the "search" functions of the ancestry industry's on-line days & days waste of space & time sapping sites and the myriad results they generate, most of which are irrelevant, but I think the ethos is, just like all the other waste of time shits, to keep you on their site, I have pretty good ad & pop-up blockers so I don't know what else they're punting but shed-loads would be my guess. All this SHOULD be in the purview of Kew! My guess is that they're on Access & we KNOW what a pile of poo Access IS!!
    Do NOT get me going on our medical records that's my latest bet-noir!
    Oh to have a government that IS technically literate & Open Source:(

    ReplyDelete

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