Sharing your family history ONLINE

When I first started my family history research some 20 years ago, my immediate question was ‘Who were the Patons?’. At that time my father had no idea if he had any aunts, uncles or cousins, and there were very few of us in the Northern Irish phone book. There was a suggestion we may have been Belgian, with family lore suggesting my grandfather had arrived in Britain prior to the First World War. Working as a television researcher for the BBC, I treated it as another research project, and applied my skills to the task at hand.

Using the fledgling Scots Origins website (later to be replaced with ScotlandsPeople), an embryonic internet (using a dial-up connection!), pen and ink, telephone calls, and some patience and determination, I eventually broke the brick wall, by discovering the existence of two first cousins in London and Glasgow, and upon meeting them learned of my family’s tragic wartime experience.

My great-grandparents of Scottish birth had been trapped with their family in Brussels during the occupation, with my great-grandfather losing his life in the process, and with my father’s uncle interned as a civilian in a POW camp near Berlin for the remainder of the conflict. The rest of my civilian family, including my grandfather, had to fend for themselves during the rest of the German occupation.

It was an epic story, but without that initial vague suggestion by my father of a possible connection to Belgium, and without identifying, tracking down and meeting our close cousins, it is highly doubtful that I would have ever learned any