Once you start down the road of genealogy, it can be hard to ever give it up. That’s especially true if you start uncovering living relatives that you’ve never met – or even heard of! – before. When you realise that there’s a whole world of people out there, who by some trick of nature […]

Making a family tree seems like a logical first step when it comes to beginning your genealogy journey. It’s a good idea, as it gives you a clear visual framework to work from. For most people, creating a basic family tree is not too hard. You know your immediate family, and probably a generation or […]

In the last week, the great beast that is modern science made an incredible announcements. Thanks to the wonderful developments in DNA sequencing, a new tool has been created by the University of Sheffield that can trace your ancestors right back to the very village they lived in over a thousand years ago. Just imagine […]

Legacy is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I mean, I am thinking about it all the time in my quest to fill out my extended family tree, but more than usual – and more specifically. See, a major part of my motivation as an amateur genealogist is to give my children something […]

Family gatherings. The events that we all love to hate! While getting together with your family can be fun and beneficial, it can also be an absolute minefield – especially if you’ve been digging around in the murky past! Many families have secrets or ‘non-events’ that they would much rather stayed hidden. The heads of […]

For many people – myself included – uncovering your genealogy is a question of uncovering yourself. Maybe your family isn’t great at communicating your shared history. Maybe all the people who could give you a sense of your family’s place in the world are dead. Maybe you are simply trying to figure out where you […]

For many people – especially younger people – the idea of studying genealogies sounds boring and useless. They figure that they are here in the world, they know who their parents and grandparents were – what else do they need to know? And that’s fine. Not everyone is interested in what has come before them. […]