Researching my family history

Thursday, November 13th, 2014

My paternal great grandmother and great grandfather

I keep trying to research my family tree, but I quickly get very frustrated with the whole thing. For the last few years I've been gathering information about my immediate family from parents, my grandmother and uncles etc, and that helps to flesh out the chequered history of the family over the last century or so.
Recent times are the easiest: just ask mum or dad about their mum and dad and already you've gone back two generations. If your grandparents are still alive (I only have one) then they can take you back another generation, probably into the 19th century.
So I have managed to get names and birth dates, sometimes marriage and death dates, going back on my father's side to the 1870s, and in some instances a little further than that.
But it's around the late 19th century when I get really confused. My surname is not too common, but it's also straightforward enough to mean there are far too many branches of the name to know if I'm on the right tree or not. And of course, 100 years ago you didn't get helpfully individual names like Shane or Monica or Jethro or Apple like you do nowadays - everybody seemed to be called either Thomas or Elizabeth!
I have discovered some interesting things about my paternal family, however. Although I hail from the Midlands, it seems my father's family went to Derby from Barrow in Cumbria, and before that lived in Ipswich, and before that in Dagenham in London. They moved around plenty, perhaps in search of work.
I also have pictures of some of my ancestors, and it's the ones I never met that I feel most curious about. My father's grandfather Thomas was a typically Victorian gentleman with an impressive moustache and there's a lovely photograph of him in his latter years in my grandfather's back garden with his wife, and they look so sweet - he in waistcoat and pocketwatch, she in apron and hobnail boots. I feel like I know them; I certainly feel like I want to know them.

My great grandfather and his son, Leonard

It's weird seeing pictures of your ancestors. They were real, they lived and breathed just like you and I, but somehow it's hard to believe that when they are mere words on a page, and a set of dates.
When you see their face, they come alive once again. I always say that nobody ever really dies, just so long as there is somebody on Earth who remembers them. Memories keep everybody alive.
Another aspect of researching ancestry I find very confusing is military history. I know my grandfather served with the Territorial Army in the 1920s and the Home Guard in the 1940s, but I have absolutely no idea where to start looking into it.
I'm a member of Ancestry.co.uk but it seems to me there is too much information on there for me to sort through. I need to be trained in how to use that site!
But I am fascinated enough to keep trying. My great-grandfather (he of the pocketwatch) would have been in his 30s at the time of the Boer War. Did he serve in the military? I tend to think not as I think he was a blacksmith, but it's so hard to find concrete confirmations for things. The 1901 and 1911 Censuses are a goldmine of surface information, but anything earlier than that and my great grandfather seems to get lost among all the other men who seemed to share his name.
I shall keep trying, persevering, because I want to know more, I want to know where I came from, perhaps in order to know where I'm going...