Family History should be fun, right? Or is it just me?
How often do you come across unexpected connections, how often wander off into non-ancestral areas just because something about them attracts you?
My Mum's roots in the pure maternal line go back rather a long time in Cornwall. My daughter had been holidaying about a mile away for several years before this was discovered.
One of my first camping holidays (and the best) as a kid was by Lulworth Cove. That's where my direct paternal line runs out (so far) in the late 18th century.
Our Dorset connections include a family with a lady postmistress who gets an unfavourable mention by a famous WW1 writer. We bought a postcard of the Lulworth area and discovered the publisher was another member of that same family.
Sometime i see a familiar, but unusual, name close by to our family in a census return and wonder if a certain schoolmate might be related. It's easy to 'waste' a day or two tracing him back to check for a possible connection.
Then there's that awful temptation when you find two brothers in your family married two sisters from another (or similar): you start to wonder if that's the first time these surnames have joined forces, and another few days get eaten up. And more than once i've explored another surname that comes up twice in our marriages, but whose members aren't obviously related.
You know that old habit of giving a child a middle name from (usually) the wife's lineage? One of my brick walls had such a middle name and this surname was certainly represented in the same county. A week or so of effort around this 'one name' didn't actually deliver the breakthrough i was looking for. But it was fun!
Then there's the ancestor who lived just a few doors or streets from one of your old haunts. A spooky feeling, especially if that place had some special memories in your life. Scary if he was the landlord of your one-time 'local'!
One of the easiest ways to get sucked in to weeks or months (or worse) of extra work is when you get a message from another researcher and their problems are interesting enough to be worth taking a 'quick look'. This has happened to me three times already in the last couple of years, with predictable results.
What about the moment you come across 'John Body' married 'Sarah Beney' (whose mother's name is 'Dunke' which also appears in your tree). Would you give in or give up? For a change, I passed on that one.
But not when it came to Jannaway or Cannaway or Carraway - i got carried away as usual. And with Chaffey, Danyell, Daughtrey, Denness, Hotstone, Lidbetter, Mant, Mew, Muckett, Netley, Nutting, Salt, Tharle...
Even an encounter with that long-lost family friend at a funeral can have its dangers. If you ever mention family history and they happen to reply 'I've got a very unusual surname'. For me that led on to the biggest diversion ever, with over a thousand descendants from one Norfolk guy who adopted the surname as written by the clergyman who married him in Cockney London. We're 99.9% sure what the original name was, but his origins still elude us.
And don't your dreams sometimes get shattered? Maybe it's best not to think about tracing your childhood sweetheart's family, even if she had such an exotic Welsh name...
Well, that's enough time wasted for one day. Just noticed it's raining and the washing's wetter that when i hung it out.
Happy hunting.
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