How it all began…

A while back (5 years ago in fact!) I started a blog on the FTM website.  Unfortunately, as a new parent, I didn’t have much time to keep it up to date and it fell by the wayside.  As I’ve now decided to use this website as a way of logging and sharing my research, I thought I’d reproduce my previous blog posts by way of an introduction……

It was my maternal grandmother, Ann Nora Moir (nee Johnson), who first got me interested in my family history.  We were looking at her wedding certificate one day and I noticed that her father’s occupation was listed as ‘fish curer’.  I’d never really thought about my ancestors until that point but this piqued my interest and once I got started, there was no looking back!

My Gran’s parents died when she was very young and she was brought up in an orphanage, Our Lady’s School, run by Catholic nuns in Norwood, London.  As a result she didn’t really know much about her ancestry, although she had plenty of anecdotal snippets and memories of her early childhood, many of which turned out to be amazingly accurate!

My research so far has concentrated on my Grandmother’s family tree and includes the surnames Johnson, Daley, Carmody, Richards, Ryan and Whittington.  With names as common as these I inevitably regularly come up against problems and seemingly brick walls but these challenges just make finding that next little piece of information so much more rewarding.

I have to admit though that I do sometimes have to hijack other people’s trees to get a ‘buzz’ when my own tree is being particularly frustrating.  My husband is blessed with a lineage strewn with unusual surnames so researching his tree is always a good bet when I need a quick genealogical ‘fix’!  Luckily he is happy enough just to know the information while I get my thrills from hunting it down!

I used to spend quite a large proportion of my leisure time researching my family tree but now that I have a 10 month old baby I find myself becoming a ‘5 minute genealogist’; grabbing every spare minute I can to continue my quest.  Even so, despite the never-ending tiredness of a new parent, I still often find myself sat at the computer in the late hours of the evening trying to solve the latest mystery.

Up until now I have mainly focused on gathering basic facts and extending my tree backwards, but having read articles in magazines such as FTM and watched programmes like ‘Who do you think you are?’, I’ve realised that it would also be very interesting to put the lives of each of my ancestors into some context.  My first subject is my Grandmother’s father, Henry John Johnson, the fish curer.  Hopefully I will be able to share some of my findings through this blog soon.