Family History for you

Family History: you’ve been meaning to look into it for years. Your cousin did some work awhile back and now their papers and notes are somewhere in the attic/cupboard. And it’s all so confusing, what with all the many branches, all from the same place, with similar names so that you can’t tell your John Smith from the other John Smith who lived down the road that your mum told you about. And now a family gathering coming up, or there’s a funeral, a wedding, a baby has been born and you want to know more, about Great Uncle Harry’s war service, about the rumour that half your family were in the workhouse, owned a castle, were related to Queen Elizabeth’s butler, was a suffragette, or went mad.

And you’ve watched one too many shows of Who Do You Think You Are and you’re thinking…now, finally you feel it’s the right time to get your own family on the map, on the tree and find the truth in all those stories.

Whether it’s about one person, or a whole branch, I can uncover it for you and wrap it up in a beautiful package with proper roll out trees and diagrams which you can whisk out whenever you need it, or put it on the wall, or email it to your other relations so you need never be in the dark again about what Aunt Elsie did with the samovar or that village down in the countryside or Great Uncle Charlie’s war service.

And there’s more! If you are thinking of, or indeed have, submitted a DNA sample and want to make sense of the results, of who all those cousins are, I can probe and prod and advise, unravelling the secrets that are only now in the blood. (although a certain amount of caution must be had…not all results are welcome, so tread carefully).

Caveats. Some secrets really are taken to the grave. Sometimes documents, are burnt, ripped up, stolen, disappeared into an attic and from there to the skip. So, there’s no full guarantee that the person or branch you are trying to find is going to be revealed. But if there is a document, I will find it. Further caveat. You may need to go and talk to your oldest relatives first. I can provide a crib sheet-all the questions you should ask even if it seems unlikely that you can keep your relative to the point.

Some of my previous work uncovered the following

• An entire circus family with lion tamers and fairground coconut shy operators
• A witness in the Salem Witch Trials
• Distant relatives of Brian Wilson of Beach Boy fame
• A chicken stealer…acquitted
• Generations of transported London ne’er do wells
• An ancestor who owned several fields in Sussex
• Head of the guild of Cutlers
• A divorced opera singer
• Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA
• Emigrants to the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India
• Soldiers and Sailors who fought in the First World War, Second World War, Boer War, Napoleonic Wars, the Seven Years War, the English Civil War and lots of other ones
• And hordes of agricultural labourers, factory workers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, shoemakers, flax dressers, loom weavers, miners, railway engineers, cotton workers and all the people who built Britain and beyond