I don't think I can stop. The love of history combined with fitting my ancestors into the historical narrative is just amazing to me. I'm a fervent believer that in order to go forwards we must understand the lessons of the past, else be doomed to repeat them. My ancestors were nobodies in the traditional view of history, and as a result, I've become passionately interested in the social history of the working classes and before them, the peasantry. I want to know about the houses they lived in, whether major historical events impacted them, how they travelled to work, why they moved country, what it was like in the workhouses, or on the docks, or in the prisons where they ended up.
One ancestor, I couldn't locate a death record for turned up in Australia to work off his criminal sentence - cue a ton of research into the life of indentured convicts during that time period, and his life on the streets after he was "freed".
Others travelled to Liverpool to escape the Potato famine. Cue research into the socio-political nightmare that was Anglo-Irish relations in the early 1800s.
One group lived in the same ten streets for generations - all of which were destroyed in the blitz. Cue research into the architectural history of English cities and attempts to reconstruct the slum housing my ancestors called home.
And now the PhD proposal I'm writing up, the idea for which came directly from genealogical research.
I still have family lines that are solid brick walls. I have others where I have more data to sift through than I have hours in the day. I have some ancestors where I can pinpoint their exact locations for large swathes of their lives, and others that I have no more than a name on a single certificate.
I love this hobby, and I'm only sad that the rest of my relatives don't seem as excited about finding the burial record of our 5Xgf's uncle as I am.
