How this site came about

One day I was feeling rootless....

I knew that my dad had been highly interested in the family history back in the 1970s and that he had frequently made my head go round and round talking about it. He and my mum had been forever taking off on expeditions to different bits of the British Isles with a small folding caravan, and coming back talking about dusty church records and gravestone inscriptions. Some time ago my dad had presented each of his children with a sheaf of notes typed on an old Amstrad computer, complete with sprocket holes and lack of formatting. And that was about as far as it went. I thought, well he's done that bit, and forgot about it.

When I got married, my new husband and I had a look for his family, because he has an unusual surname, and found a few relations we didn't know he had. And that was as far as that went too.

Then thirty years rolled by. I had three children, they grew up, I got divorced. One by one the children left home. Then one day in early 2005 - I started feeling rootless. With all the research my dad had done, I realised that I knew precious little further back than the names of my grandparents. I didn't even know where those grandparents had come from - apart from that it wasn't where I came from. The only thing I did know, was that my family seemed to suffer from congenitally itchy feet. Neither I, nor any of my siblings, were living in the place where we were born - and we weren't all born in the same place. Neither parent had spent their life in the same place, and both seemed to have moved long distances, several times, both before and after they met. And I knew from things people had said, as well as from my parents' holiday expeditions, that this seemed to have been happening for a very long time before they were born. There was nowhere of all the places I had lived which I felt I could really call home.

At about the same time, there came into my possession several boxes of old photos which came from my parents' home after it was sold when they went into residential care. When I started to work through these, I found that among the packets of holiday snaps there were many pictures of much greater age, some well over 100 years old, and most labelled in some way, and I realised that these were pictures of people some of whom I had never heard of, but who must be my ancestors. There was also a whole box of negatives, many of which I suspected had never been printed. I knew that I had limited time to identify them. My dad had died in 2001, and my mother was increasingly frail and forgetful. In one of the boxes there were also a few documents, notably a birth certificate for someone born in 1826 and a receipt for payment for a burial in Manchester in 1862, along with some old letters from somebody signing herself "Your affectionate Cousin Florence". Who were these people? I had to find out!

So I set out to look for where my roots really were. I talked to all my close family to find out what they knew. I printed copies of photos and took them in to show my mother in the hope that she might identify them. I wrote to some other relations where I knew addresses, and some of them replied. I searched locally and online, looking at census returns, certificates and parish records.

What I have found so far has led me all over the British Isles, to Canada and the USA, to Australia and New Zealand, Europe, India and China. I have been able to verify some of my parents' stories, and find some new ones of my own, owing to the advances in technology which have taken place since the 1970's. I have found details which have made me both laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. I have done this all without moving more than 30 miles from where I live now - but I've found that my roots are everywhere. I'm not rootless, I’m part of a tree which is multi-rooted, spreads throughout the world and is still growing.

So I started to put this site together - to give the best chance for all the global family to share it. If you fit into this family somewhere and you're reading this, welcome! - and please let me know anything interesting which you know, so that I can add it to the site. If you aren't a member of this family, but you are interested in these stories, welcome too, and visit again soon, because new things are being added all the time. It may never be finished, because neither families nor history do ever finish. Taken both together, they're a powerful combination. So enjoy reading, and happy searching.

© V Elleson 2006