What made me decide to start a blog? Well over the years of I have made many discoveries on my family history and thought sharing them would make my ancestors become more alive. For the past couple of years I had shared some on Facebook family history groups, but not all family members are on the social media scene. Having read many blogs over the past year, they not only show family history as factual stories of family members but also about their links to social history. Some of my discoveries have been based on stories passed down from family members. I am hoping this website will be interesting but also hoping that long lost family members might come across this.
My research is forever on going and I love it. I have learnt by trial and error mainly when looking at records and piecing the data together to fill in the gaps. It all started 20 years ago, when I started to enter data into a basic software package and realised I knew quite a bit but had large gaps.
Initially joined family history societies for the counties where many of family come from and visiting a few records offices. At the time, none of the records were online, so painstaking searching through microfiche started which was a slow process, but very interesting all the same.
Once Ancestry website came along, it opened a whole new world so of course became a member in 2006. A few years later joined MyHeritage website as well. Both were very useful, but realised trees that had been deposited on them from members had gaps and incorrect information. This got me thinking, how accurate and thorough do people go. The hints from these sites have proved useful sometimes, but realised I had to really look at the sources myself, and rely on several records to find out more about a certain person. Some people were easy with unusual names and names being passed down. Unfortunately some proved really difficult by changing their names between birth and marriage. I still have some brick walls to break through. I have discovered a multitude of other websites that offer links to records too, ie Findmypast and FreeBMD. However DNA testing has been a delight in confirming my discoveries.
So welcome to my journey of discoveries…
Debbie's Discoveries blog 