Well, my feed has been full of these amazing pedigree charts from fellow genealogists, so I just had to join in. In fact I've done four - my parents, my own and my daughters, to see the differences a generation makes in both directions.
No wonder that DNA puzzle is hard to solve.
This was all initiated by J Paul Hawthorne. What a great idea.
ME
DAD
MUM
LAUREN
There you go - not as pretty as they could be, but you get the general idea. You might need to enlarge them to read closely.
Since leaving Scotland and driving south we have been mostly in Wales. Three countries and no passports required. Love it.
On our way south we stopped off at the teeny tiny o-l-d village of Kemberton in Shropshire where a branch of the family had lived in the 1800's. No evidence of them in the churchyard though, even though some still lived there as little as 100 years ago.
We spent 4 nights at a little cottage "Stargazer's Loft" near Hay-on-Wye, Actually pretty much on the border, so we slept in England and shopped and ate in Wales. Also, there were only two windows at either end of the loft so not really much stargazing either.
I'm a bit over driving, but we had a good look around. Hay is famous for books and their annual book festival. There are bookshops everywhere and lots of choice for food as well plus two castles. Trouble with books is that they are heavy...but it cant be helped. A couple just begged to come with us.
One day we drove to Dolgellau in north west Wales, in the Snowdonia National Park, but near the coast to visit a friend of Lauren's. She was staying in her grandmother's cottage high up on a hill, accessible by a very steep, single track road. Luckily the only car we met on the way up, was her Mum at the farm gate, and on the way down another at the intersection of the main road. Whew.
Another day we went to Ludlow and then on to Llanymynech. Ludlow is very quaint full of all that Old English charm, black and white timbered houses and buildings, a market (with more books begging to join those others we'd taken in at Hay) and a castle ruin dating back to 1086. Llanymynech is associated with family as the James and Thomas families (try tracing those names in this part of the world) came from border towns which were sometimes Wales, sometimes Hereford or Shropshire depending on where the border was at the time. Today the border goes right through Llanymynech.
And then it was time to leave and relocate to Cardiff. However, we came to Cardiff via Taunton ! Seems stupid I know, to spend so much time in the car on motorways when I'm so over driving. But, Lauren's boots were there and we thought we should go and get them while we still had the use of a rental car.
It was good to be able to visit and catch up with some of the Somerset folk who we had stayed with earlier in our trip. We caught a glimpse of some of the balloons at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta as we headed back toward Wales in the evening. Trying to take photos at speed though proved a bit tricky (not me mind, Lauren was the photographer).
So now we are in Cardiff, which seems like a great place, lovely architecture, a good balance of old and new, and a busy town centre with great shopping and food.
The real reason for visiting Cardiff was so that I could attend my "Try Out" for the Pack (volunteers) for the Rugby World Cup 2015. So I have done that this morning. 20,000 applied, 10,000 were invited to attend a "Try Out" and 6,000 will be lucky enough to be involved at the actual event. It was a great experience: id photos, some informal mixing, icebreaker activities (rugby passes etc), a short video about what the roles could entail, a 20 minute interview and then uniform fittings. Now the waiting begins as they don't expect to be informing the successful 6,000 until Jan/Feb 2015.
The internet is a marvellous creation.
When my Dad started tracing our family even microfiche or microfilmed records were scarce. This meant you had to GO to libraries or other repositories and read pages and pages often not finding anything you were looking for. For us, all the way over here in New Zealand, trying to learn more about our forebears and reconnect with family in the United Kingdom was a very long, often hit and miss experience. Dad spent his lunch break at the British Embassy studying electoral rolls and phone books. Eventually, he wrote to a selection of people with our surname in the area of Somerset from whence we came. Luckily, some of the people he wrote to were also researching the family and had a lost branch they didn't know how to reconnect. US !!!
When I started researching my daughter's father's family there was still no internet, but microfiche and microfilmed records were becoming more accessible. Distance was still a barrier though. I was researching Australian families while living in New Zealand. The microfiche Pioneer and Federation birth, death and marriage indexes for New South Wales were well used as I strove to piece together families - and then order certificates to hopefully confirm my guesses. So much easier when we moved back there for a bit.
Over the last twelve or so years, thanks to the internet I have been able to "meet" a number of cousins and other relatives all researching different parts of what is fast becoming a world family tree.
A chance find on a message board (when I should have been working) lead to reconnecting two branches of my Nana's family. The connection had only been lost in the late 1960's and although we had looked into leads several times we just weren't sure how to take the next step. At least we had an idea who we were looking for though - they had no idea about us, so it was a big surprise for them. Between us we have grown the information on this branch massively. Along the way we have connected with others who share the same 3 x great grandparents, each with a wealth of research to share.
The biggest surprise for my Mum and myself, was the discovery that there were other members of my Nana's family living in New Zealand. Nana had emigrated here in 1929 to join her elder sister who had emigrated shortly after she married. She didn't seem to know much about earlier generations of her family - or at least if she did, she didn't share a lot. All of her grandparents had died before she was born - actually before her parents were married, and most of her mother's immediate family emigrated to the USA. I'm sure if she knew that her grandfather's elder sister had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1880's and that she had had cousins here, that she would have tried to contact them. Their names were completely unheard of by us until the last few years. But the revelation that some of them had lived in the same city as Nana and at the same time was a bit mind blowing.
None of us were aware of this at all - but there was obviously contact between them and the families still living in England because discovered in a photo album (last year) that made the journey from England to the USA in 1905 there is a photo of one of the "cousins' in New Zealand. There also seems to have been quite an admiration for one of those kiwi cousins, as there are seven other girls (six in one branch) in one branch who were bestowed her name, and slight variations of it - two even having her surname added as one of their christian names. Initially we thought perhaps it was the number one name of the time - but the added surname as a christian name kinda blew that out of the water.
It has been great growing the story of our family with this little bunch of detectives from all over the world. The discovering is still going on with families uncovered and reconnected in Scotland, England, New Zealand, USA, Australia so far. Our 3 x great grandparent agricultural labourers from a tiny village in Shropshire could never have imagined how their family would grow and travel across the globe.
