It’s been a while since I wrote anything. It’s this family history thing. You start off nonchalantly with a shrug of the shoulders and a “So what?” and before you know it you’re immersed in dates and times and statistics so magnetic that you find yourself wallowing in a quagmire of history you were never quite aware existed – and you are having a helluva time trying to extricate yourself…
A “second cousin” ( is that the same as being “twice removed”?) started it all off – although I had been quite attracted to the TV programme “Who Do You Think You Are?”, wherein various celebrities trawl back through their ancestries, sometimes coming up with something worth noting, both by themselves and by the viewer.
But when this second cousin of mine sent me a pile of her research , which showed me that my paternal grandfather had enjoyed a few more brothers and sisters than I had ever been aware of, it made me curious. It made me even more curious when I discovered that even my Aunt Florrie – Grandad’s youngest of eight children, and the only one left living that I could consult – didn’t know that she’d had so many aunts and uncles..!
I couldn’t leave it there so I started digging. And before long I found myself digging deeper and deeper. Suddenly, I was hooked. I began to understand why chasing up your ancestors becomes an addiction. So now I’m addicted…
My wife complains that she has become a “computer widow”. I appear to be spending far more time on the computer than I used to spend in front of the goggle-box.
Excuse me. There’s a slight alteration I have to make to my family tree on the “Ancestry” website…
