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It would be so easy to fill this front page with just fine detail of each generation from my family history, but instead, I have just put in a few highlights (for me, even if for no-one else!) and placed my specific interests on the back pages.
My family divides into four parts based on their known points of origin: Suffolk, London with Middlesex, Shropshire and NIScott (the Irish immigrants who settled in Southwest Scotland at the start of the 19th century.
As for most people, the biggest problem has been tracing the NIScots across the water in Ireland. With the massive destruction of the records in the 1920s, it has proven almost impossible to find them before they moved to Scotland. Indeed, in many cases I only think I know they came from Ireland because they said so in the census!
The highlights for me have always been the things which make my various ancestors more real --even if only just a little.
James Vango, who wove the silk for Queen Victoria's wedding dress and his ancestor Peter Vango dealing with his apprentices.
Lucy Waring, master (sic!) baker, busy supplying the sacramental bread and bread for the poor to Allhallows Church London Wall.
Richard Doggett buying land recorded in complicated deeds of the 1520s and his descendants who emigrated in the 1630s to America with John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts.
John McSevney (see the photo above) falling overboard and drowning at two a.m. on a freezing February morning in Ballantrae Harbour in 1881
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