YOUR ANCESTORS' FANS!
Ilike to think that family history research has moved on significantly from the days when the aim of most researchers was simply to fill in as many names as they could on their pedigree chart. They might enhance the pedigree with the occasional date of birth, death or marriage while the particularly adventurous would include some places associated with their ancestors, or even an occupation or two.
Nowadays, there’s – quite rightly! – much more emphasis on the ‘family’ aspect of family history. We now want to understand more about our
ancestors lives and, in order to do that, we’ve had to learn a lot of new skills.
Thoughts on the wider family
The first step on this particular journey is to extend our research to include immediate family. Exploring the lives of the brothers and sisters of our direct ancestors can prove enormously rewarding. These are, after all, people that they would have known intimately and they would have shared many experiences with them. Weddings and funerals may not always have witnessed the major family gatherings that we’re used to today but they would still have been events that people were aware of. The death of an ancestor would have been mourned not just by the familiar names on your particular branch of the tree but also by a whole host of
