Needing to Hit the Family History Again!

I do love doing my family history, but sometimes I can get very stressful and frustrating when searching for that one "right" person or document, from 10,000 or 20,000 or more, even after "narrowing it down" with what you think is "personal facts". I've had to leave it awhile as my blood pressure and other health problems hit. It was just too much  when I wasn't supposed to be getting "any stress".

I use a lot of different resources, and last year, treated myself to a membership with Ancestry.com ... and did my DNA.

It's interesting tracking my family members back, and exploring how life was in their eras. The "social norms", their struggles, fashions, what was "great" during their day, the highs and lows.

I've never been so much interested by the "so-and-so, born, died, onto the next one" attitude that some people have about their family history, simply wanting to fill all the blank spots on a family tree chart.

I want to know so much more. These ancestors of mine were real people. People who lived, worked, loved, grew older, many had very hard lives compared to the way we live today, and with a lot less creature comforts.

I remember talking with my nan once about all the changes she had seen in her lifetime (she was born in 1908 and lived to be 73)... from horse-drawn vehicles, to motor cars, to airships and aeroplanes, telephones (she never owned one), radio, tv, man going up into space ... all in one lifetime.

Myself, I was born in 1955, so remember black and white tvs with only 2 channels - BBC and ITV. ITV had the advertising, BBC you had to have the tv licence for. Then they came out with BBC-2, and later ITV brought out Channel 4.

I remember "old money" - "real" money - pounds, shillings and pence. I remember the days before the "Common Market", later the EEC.

I remember innocent playground games, jacks, stones, ball games, skipping games. 

I remember being a member of the Girl's Life Brigade and having "parade" through the town the first Sunday of every month, with the Boy's Brigade, their band playing awesome marching songs whose cadence kept us in step,  and certain other organizations with us.

I remember mini skirts, midi skirts and maxi skirts, along with hot pants and drainpipe stretch jeans. I also remember a Summer in 1980 or 1981, when I picked up a beautiful lace bodiced, tiered Victorian day dress, and spent most of the warm days wearing it and carrying a parasol! Yes, I was always a bit "different".

I remember, well into the 1960s, seeing bombed out houses, and cleared areas that had once been streets of homes. Some streets had rows of prefabs on them, to house those left homeless by the bombed out places.

I used to love seeing the horse-drawn drays delivering beer to the pubs, rolling barrels down through the trapdoor in the pavement to the cellars. The horses would always have their noses in a bag of feed, standing patiently, unphased by the noises behind them. Back then, London also had plenty of Victorian stone water troughs still around. Now, sadly, very few still exist.

Also Victorian tenements, long razed to the ground now in the name of "slum clearance" but magnificent with their stone stairways, huge, thick wooden doors, and brass knockers that resonated when you rapped them.

My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never experience any of what my nan, and I, experienced unless I pass on my memories in the way my nan did with me. This pic is of me and my nan in 1962, somewhere in Cornwall.

Likewise, without my delving into the times that my ancestors lived in, I won't know or understand what they went through, and what "miracles" they saw and experienced.

So, I'm hoping that my health is now on the mend again, and I can get back into my research, as I find it so fascinating.