Putting it all Together

Although I have a million miles to go before I’ve completed this project, which seems to become more mammoth with every scrap of information I unearth, I can’t help thinking about what I’m going to do with it all.

One outcome would be to write up a family history, but I can’t help thinking that 1) some family stories are best left untold; and 2) “great-aunt-maude’s-next-door-neighbour’s-visitor-falling-down-the-well-after-running-off-with- the-ploughman”-type histories are not what interests me.

When I began this project, my principal interest lay in the choices that families and individuals make during their lives – what drives people to make the decisions that they do. For example, my great-grandfather was raised in Edinburgh and settled in Tonga – why? In trying to find out how he came to be there, I discovered that I first had to establish all sorts of links to previous generations and my focus has shifted from “why did they do this?” to a more basic “who were they?”

It is difficult to describe the thrill of finding another piece to the jigsaw. When I found my great-great-uncle’s passport application, and especially his photo, I was ecstatic. I could actually see this person and imagine him going about his business - what's more it provided a valuable link to a family that I had hitherto only been able to assume belonged to my family tree. When I found my ancestors in Lybster in the Scottish highlands – my family - over 200 years ago, I was quite astonished that there was this common thread going back that far – and, of course, even further.

So, although I could ask all sorts of questions about why my ancestors made the choices they did, I’ve decided to concentrate at this stage to piecing together the family tree and allowing the information I find to tell its own story.

The main thing is that this family tree is accessible to everyone. I started to enter the details on www.ancestry.co.uk which produces a very nice chart and allows you to fill in all sorts of details. However, It would seem that only members of the site – and it can cost up to $US200 to register – can view the information. So I’m giving some thought to how I might publish the tree so that others can see it – The LDS is looking like a viable option and I’ll discuss them in a later blog. In the meantime, I’ll sketch up a quick family tree from what I have now and publish that within my next couple of posts.