My grandsons, born 1989 and 1991, were both required to do a simple three generation family tree for a primary school project, aged about nine.
My primary school curriculum in the 1940s relating to family was incorporated into our first lesson on the subject of graphs. We pupils had to ask our mothers how old she was when we were born. I was a sponge where learning new skills were concerned but after collating the information for that graph I learned to my absolute horror that my mother was ANCIENT when she had me - she was all of twenty-one whereas all my little pals mothers had them aged eighteen (all except one girl whose mother was aged 42 - but to my mind at that time, she didn't count - of course lol).
I must have been a late teen when my mother mentioned that my 21 year old cousin Brian was researching his family and was I thinking of doing mine?
It had never crossed my mind - through the years I'd cross examined older family members about their lives, where they were born and knew where in the pecking order that all our living Jims, Toms, Herbert, Cyril, Edies, Ednas, Elsies, etc., and I even knew their long term friends.
Three years later, same age as me, cousin Terence had started researching his family and came across an upper crust family hall - one aunt was extremely excited about the family she'd married into.
My Destiny was to start researching my family after I'd retired. My retirement plans were to learn to play the piano and have other hobbies - those plans were ditched after my daughter made an appointment with a lady who viewed past lives in a teacup. The sceptic in me didn't believe she'd seen a chap in a soldier's uniform saying "His Pals called him Harry but he preferred his real name Henry"- he died WWI.
After an old aunt vaguely remembered she'd once had an Uncle Henry is when I started researching my family's histories. My grandmother's oldest brother, W. Henry Fleming of the Hull Pals died 28th August 1918 aged 41.
