Like any new venture there were a lot of mistakes made in the first few months and then after about a year I decided the software wasn’t quite what I needed. I started using another program called Genopro, which I find excellent, but during the process of transferring the data the inevitable happened and I lost quite a bit of it. Many years on and I have soft and hard copies of documents and the data is backed up in two different places…………………..just in case.

Information from living relatives is hugely important as you get the personal details and a feel of how life was lived and I was lucky to be given photographs and documents when I first started which had been kept and handed down through the generations.

Do you know the names of your great-grandparents, or the kind of lives they had? It is surprising how little we know of our family history and how little has been passed down the generations. It is uncommon for us to have known our own great-grandparents these days or to hear about their lives from our families, and often nothing at all is known about the generations beyond that.

To delve into our own family’s past is a fascinating hobby and sometimes an emotional journey, as you may have seen on the BBC programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Those of you who enjoy detective stories or puzzles can get great pleasure and a sense of achievement from piecing together the snippets of information, like Hercule Poirot, into a verifiable family history. Many riddles can be solved and family stories proved or disproved. One such story in my own family prevailed for many years and was vehemently upheld as true by my maternal grandfather. The story goes like this…….

My grandfather’s parents had both died by the time he was10 years old and the money from their estate put into a trust fund which was held by a firm of solicitors. Money was released on request by his guardian to buy shoes, clothes etc. He has always maintained that the solicitors ‘ran off with the money’.

I have been able to show by careful research that his mother re-married aged 39 yrs to a young soldier aged 22 yrs (this skeleton was well hidden in the cupboard) and within 6 months she had died. So……… maybe the solicitors were innocent and the young soldier inherited it, who knows? It is a great pity that I did not start my research earlier when my grandfather was alive, we may have got to the bottom of the mystery. I am sure that many other families have similar stories of the ‘missing fortune’.