RootsChat.Com

Hi Keith
We are definitely distant cousins! My connection is mostly down the female line, so there have been lots of surname changes along the way, and the name Woodward wasn't even known by any of my living relatives until I started researching the family tree. Our Worcestershire connections died out long ago too.
I am descended from Elizabeth Woodward who married Henry William Frazer, and can tell you more about their family if you need any gaps filling in. My 2x great grandmother Fanny Elizabeth Frazer is living with her grandfather William Woodward in 1861. I have some photos of her from later in life (luckily my family is really good at hanging on to old photos and other bits and bobs!) She died in Eastbourne in 1937.

I also found the marriage in Little Comberton but wasn't confident enough to add it to my tree yet, so am investigating further

For me it's like doing a giant sudoku (which I also love), with the added bonus of knowing that what your ancestors did directly affected your own existence. Plus I love all the interesting names you discover along the way!

Had a bit of a breakthrough today but I seem to have a large amount of people in my tree who have no children. (There are plenty who have lots of children as well). But having no children means there aren't m/any people looking for them and just fewer records all round to give any more clues about other people.

But childless people can be useful too! If they left a will, their beneficiaries might be siblings, nieces and nephews. The informant on their death certificate might be a relative too, and so might other people buried in the same grave.

I'm currently going through all the unmarried and/or childless people in my tree and searching for them in the 1939 register. Quite often there are other family members in the same household. In one case, a single lady was living with two of her widowed sisters - I hadn't previously been able to trace them beyond 1911.

Both my sets of grandparents met because of WW2. Both grandfathers were in the RAF and this led to them meeting their future wives.

A generation before that, I strongly suspect that one of my sets of great-grandparents met because of WW1, but I have no proof.

I also exist because of the railway. In the 1880s my g-g-grandfather moved to Surrey to work on the railways, and it was there that he met and married my g-g-grandmother. Another set of g-g-grandparents moved from a rural area to a town that was becoming a popular resort due to the arrival of the railway.

I would love to see more information about occupations recorded on parish registers to help with our pre-1837 research.

It's great when you come across some older registers which record as much information as possible - for example, I've got some from the late 1700s which include the mother's maiden name on baptisms. And then on the flip side, some burial registers are just a list of names, no ages or anything, so I guess my best use of the time machine is to get some extra information on those records!