Susan Tobin Bailey

I wonder how many other people, like me, have decided to try to research their family tree, only to find it takes over their lives? When I began I never realised just how addictive it would become. I have spent so much time on this recently that everything else has gone by the wayside. Oh, the excitement when I find a snippet of information after days of searching all the online sites. 

What is it that interests us so much about knowing who our ancestors were? People sometimes wonder why we do it. What do we have when we've found a line of names connected to us? Don?t we just have a list of names that mean nothing to us? 

I'm very new to this as I only started researching a couple of months or so ago, but I've come to realise that we can find out much more than just the names of our ancestors. 

Just from following a particular person through the censuses we can find out where they were and the job they were doing every ten years. We can see if they've had any more children or if any of their children have left home. 

I could see from the censuses that my grandfather left home when he was 12 to go and work on a farm together with one of his brothers. A later census shows that his brother had returned back home but my grandfather didn't. 

Following another family through the censuses I could watch as they had more children and then when the wife was widowed and went to live with some of her relations. 

I find it fascinating to find out these little things about the people I'm connected to and to research into the towns and villages where they lived to find out what their lives must have been like at the time they were living. 

Family research is much more than finding just names, it's about finding the whole history surrounding your family and if you begin, I'm sure, like me, you'll become addicted too.