Geneology.... is this anyone's hobby or pastime?

[50Running50]

My Dad recently visited and we spoke s bit about his childhood and family which peaked my interest a little bit!

So I spent an otherwise boring Thursday evening up into the small hours looking up family on a website! Fascinating and I think I've got the bug!

Anyone got any experiences?

Yep. I find I t's horribly addictive! Set yourself time limits when you go on the websites!

By the way, there are books you can get (name escapes me) you can give to your Dad and older relatives which prompts them to jot down family history and memories. It can help bring out lots of the little details that are so interesting but rarely come up in conversation. My DM has been slowly working her way through one his year. Might be worth a look.

Have fun!

Definitely very addictive!

I keep going off at tangents so I haven't even got back very far!! I've been doing a class so we have started on doing actual histories now - so finding all we can about one person at a time rather than just doing a basic family tree. Of course sometimes you want a time machine so you can go up to someone and ask "Why did you do this", "where did you go" "Did you know about xx".

Thankyou! It's not just me then!

I'm off on a tangent regularly I finding. Will look out for the book but only 2 relatives on my dad's side I'm in contact with alive!

Do you pay for further access?

Find my past, which is one of the genealogy websites, is free to use this weekend - from today until 10th

www.findmypast.co.uk/family-story/

There are free sites - Family Search (run by the Mormon Church) is a big one. But you can't always get all the info you need - for instance you get the quarter of the year that someone is born in not the exact date. And if you want copies of certificates you'll have to pay for them.

It is dangerously addictive. I've been hooked for over a decade.

Some hints I wish I'd had:

1. Record everything including sources. You think you'll remember but you won't.
2. Put the thumbscrews on all your relatives and milk them for any family history and stories/photos etc. Maybe do an audio recording of the interview. Some may be untrue but often they have a grain of truth which turns up something interesting. 3)If you get keen consider buying a genealogy program such as Family Historian to record and manage all your data. They cost about £30 or less and mean your not having to rifle through acres of paper to find info.
3. Be creative in your approach. Make like a ferret down a rabbit hole. If one angle doesn't work try another. Remember names can be spelt differently, nicknames used, ages recorded wrongly. 5)You may have to buy a subscription to one of the websites such as Ancestry or FindMyPast. Thy are about £100 per year. I share mine with my sister as we research different families.
4. Be prepared for skeletons in the closet.Even the most boring families have them. And be aware that not all your ancestors will have been perfect or even decent human beings.

Have fun.

There is a course on FutureLearn that introduces people to researching, documenting and presenting their findings - focussing on available (even obscure) records for GB, US, Ireland, Australia etc.
It's not my area of research but it I learned something, too. It was great fun and free.

Yes I've been doing mine for about 20 years and have a few thousand in my tree.
I love it!
I recommend you are meticulous in your record searching, it's really easy to make assumptions as you go.
What I enjoy is learning about all kinds of things as I research parts of my tree, like emigration, immigration, different jobs.
A really cool thing is to get a subscription to the British Newspaper Archives online where you can access local newspapers and read about some of your ancestors in print!

Yes back to the 1600s currently.
It's addictive and frustrating and you can go down the wrong path for days before realising.
In addition to this first names are often called something else completely and surnames are spelt a trillion bloody ways.

@thesendiaries
Oh yes, and in the village my DH's familiy comes from EVERY male was called Johann + a second name that was often ommitted.

Researched the Scottish side of my family a few years ago, got back to 1760. Loved finding out little details and proving/debunking family stories. But Scottish records are really easy to research as you can download certificates from the Scotland's People website.

Recently tried researching the English side of the family and it is VERY frustrating as the records just aren't available online in the same way and I can't narrow down searches with such scant information.

Also love old family photographs and seeing the family resemblances e.g. my brother is the spitting image of our paternal great-grandmother.

Yep. An addict here.
I've one ancestor I really love, Jane X, she was a middle aged spinster living in a small Staffordshire village. In 1768 she was struck by lightning and killed 'crossing The Nether Field'.
This was written along the margin of the Parish Burial Record. I like to imagine that Jane probably nondescript in life, was the talk of the village in the days after her death.
It was surreal to visit the Church, see the actual register and run my fingers over her entry.

Oh and (slightly outing) women in the family on my gran's side either have webbed feet or 6 toes. Family originally from little more than a hamlet with an obviously small gene pool probably accounts for this, and an uncle then marrying a niece and having lots of kids.

A number of our ancestors spent time in the workhouse for some reason or another - this has prompted a passion in me for workhouse history.

It is really fascinating - though I'll probably never find "Michel from Gallia" who married into the village in the early 16hundreds.
And you'll get links to all sorts of areas i. g. mining history, epidemics (very sad!), industrialisation etc.

How do you get actual birth certificates with parents names? Do you have to pay for those?

I’ve got back to 1700s

Hit some dead ends with common names though.

Would like to get back into it.

You can view a lot on line Broken but if you want the actual certificate you need to pay.

Lots of skeletons in mine.
Unmarried mothers, fatherless children, a drunk, someone who was killed on his way home to his fiance who married his brother. A mother who went mad and tried to kill her mother and child.

Crazy stuff.

I came across a case of infanticide and have gone on to use it within my (very basic) academic work.

@mateysmum the skeletons are the fun bit!!

starfish You are so right. The illegitimate children, the scorned husband who cut his wife and kids from the will, the criminal, the husband who never admitted he had a wife as his father would disown him, the tragic accidental shooting of a boy by his cousin. They are all in DH's family tree.

Utterly addicted to it. It's a bit like a giant jigsaw piecing it all together. Mine are mostly poor and unimportant and living hard lives. I wonder what they'd think of someone recording their existence and lives 200 or 300 years after they were around.
DH's has a lot of posh ancestors so that's very entertaining for me as I like history.

@thesendiaries thank you. I seem to have come to a dead end with my grandparents as I don't know their parents names! Ah well!

DF's ancestors ... all lived, married and died within 20 mile radius of one place.
Only took us 6 weeks to find them all.

ohhhhh how i get sucked into ancestry in the dark long winter months...my son in law asked for my help but his line is proving really hard to get info on (uk) i presume war and poverty