I started researching my family tree back in 2001, starting with my maternal grandfather. This proved the most difficult branch of the family as there aren’t a great deal of Irish records still extant coupled with the fact that civil registration began much later that it did in the rest of Great Britain. 8 years ago material available on the internet was also very sparse so much of my research was done at my local Family History Centre, poring over a hot microfilm reader. In the autumn of 2001 I went to Dublin for a few days with my mother and we spent many happy hours in the General Register Office. We also made it up to Mayo for a day and were able to track down where he had lived as a child.
After a break for a couple of years I then started researching the rest of my family. With the advent of sites like Ancestry it had become a lot easier and I was able to do much of it online. It was also made easier by the fact that I still live in the same area that my father’s family has been for at least the last 200 years. I was able to do a lot of research at local archives (Sheffield and Doncaster) and although, again, it involved much poring over microfilm and microfishe at least I didn’t have to wait a month for the films to arrive! Having been well and truly bitten by the genealogy bug I have also done some research into my husband’s family.
My research has pretty much ground to a halt for the moment. Partly due to other calls on my time and partly because I have gone as far as I can using the inernet as a resource. To get any further back will involve traipsing up and down the country to various archives, something I just don’t have the time for at the moment.
As to the name I have given to my site, well what can I say? It’s pretty much true! I have uncovered several instances of bigamy and illegitimacy. Some I knew about beforehand, some were a surprise. Much is made today by politicians and the media about “the decline in family values” but, if my own family is anything to go by, families have always been re-arranging themselves. It is only in recent years that they have been able to do this within a legal framework, back in “the good old days” they just moved a few miles and changed their name. My great-uncle Sam was well-known within the family for occasionally getting drunk at family gatherings and announcing solemnly “We’re all a bunch of bastards!” to the dismay of some of the more staid (which is probably why he did it). It turns out he wasn’t far wrong.
