Introduction

Around 1997, when I was 15 or so, my Mum sparked up an interest in family history. She took a night school course and began to research her own lines. As she found things out and certificates began to arrive in the post she tried to show them to me but honestly, I wasn’t even remotely interested.

I don’t know if it’s because I was too young or because I didn’t feel connected to the work she was doing, but for the next couple of years I struggled to muster even a passing interest in the subject until she eventually gave up talking to me about it!

Looking back, I can hardly believe how I felt and behaved at the time in regards to such a fascinating subject.

In 2001 The National Archives released the 1901 cencus on-line, this peaked my interest! It was on-line, I was on-line, all of sudden things seemed so much easier; this was something I could try from my bedroom with no help and just a few pounds. Where was the harm in looking, right?

At the time the extent of my Atkinson genealogy knowlege was what my Grandad had told me when I was younger, before he died. Along with a collection of stories he had basically told me that the Atkinson family came from Redcar and were fisherman.

In actuality neither of these facts are strictly true, however I didn’t know that at the time and obviously neither did my Grandad! I accessed the new website and began downloading all of the cencus pages from Redcar which had Atkinsons on them, printing them out and highlighting the families.

As the pages came out of the printer and I highlighted more and more names I began to feel strange. These were all real people, and some of them could have been my people. I felt like I needed to re-claim them, I wanted to draw in missing lines, I wanted to know who of these men and women may have been my ancestors, where they came from and where they went, when they were born and how they died, how they lived there lives and how their choices and actions had fallen together in such a way that meant not only did I exist but I was the sort of person that I am today.

Really, I was hooked. I had got the bug. I was feeling what Mum had felt a few years previously and had tried so hard to share with me. All of a sudden I could see why she was so frustrated when I wasn’t interested—how could anyone not be interested in a topic as important as this?

As I write this seven years on I have now discovered hundreds of years of family history. I have been to places I would never have been and found out things that I would never have known.

I have come to realise that doing this sort of research is one of the most important and interesting things that anyone can do. It’s certainly not for everybody, it takes patience and an analytical mind, but it’s there for anybody to try.

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I want to make this part of my site for two reasons. Firstly I want to be able to help people to begin their own family tree. I think a lot of people would quite like to research their family history but really have no idea where to start!

Secondly I want to get some of my research on-line so that it can get indexed into Google and other people researching the same areas might come across it. I’ve found information and even relatives myself this way!

This is an e-mail which I received earlier in the year:

Dear Ian,

I just found your website. I gather your great-great-grandfather was Jabez Atkinson, born 1853/4 at Eryholme. My great-grandfather was Jabez’s brother Frederick, born 1859/60 at Middleton St George, so that makes us cousins. I’d be interested to know how far you’ve investigated our Atkinson ancestors. I’m still at an early stage, I live in Leeds, so perhaps we could meet some time?

John.

It turns out that even though we're separated by 150 years of history John only works over the road from me! The more people that can get their research on-line the more that information can be indexed and people can find eachother in this way.

Although family history deals with the past the Web is the perfect place for taking research methods forwards to make things easier for everyone. The same things are possible now that always have been, but everything takes less time and less travelling!