Amongst my many interests, Family history is one of my favorites as it not only involves an appreciation of history and social and economic change, but it is also a very personal thing; a hunt if you will, in which one is chasing the elusive lives of one's ancestors.
Of course the ways in which the hunt is continued is up to the individual: some prefer scavenging records for 'big dates'- the milestone events such as birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial, each one fitting nicely into an impersonal paradigm of history.
That dates alone are the bare bones of genealogy as Family history is also known, is undoubted, and yet isn't also right that we should learn more about the people themselves- where they lived, what they did for a living and what they believed in. In many cases one is priviledged to discover such in-depth information.
Certainly, the further back in time you reach, the less source material there remains to guide you, and yet it is from this very remoteness, this very exasperating search for clues that one derives the sheer enjoyment of family history.
All of us hope to find out just that little bit more, to answer the often bewildering questions and complications that present themselves, and, if we are lucky (for it is surely not through any design) we should come across that crucial missing link, we thank goodness for it's serendipity, before ploughing back into the past once more.
Myself and my brother, Andrew are tracing many parts of our family tree, on both our mother's and our father's side of the family.
One of our prinicipal lines of research has been into the CROSSWAITE family.
Please see Andrew's family history page
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