Rootsweb

Almost 40 years ago, as a result of a chance remark by my wife, Gill, along the lines of, "Stop talking about it and do it!", I began on a remarkable journey - I started to trace my family tree. As a young man in his early 30's I had such minor responsibilities as a job, mortgage, wife and the first of our two sons, James, to consider, so I was not... able to devote as much time as I would have liked to the new and enthralling pastime. Frustration began to creep into my life. A conversation with an old hand at the Portsmouth Records Office put me right - I was ill! I was suffering from a terrible and, sad to say, fatal disease classified as "Genealogicus terminus" - a well known condition frequently encountered in the world of genealogical research. You all know the symptoms; a racing heart as you approach a Records Office; the rush of adrenalin when a new twig is added to the tree, that insatiable craving when you know it will be several weeks, possibly months, before you get back to the hunt. It was this craving that proved my downfall. Faced with the prospect of long periods of time between fixes of the genealogical drug, I looked around in search of a substitute, another project, that could satisfy my needs. "I know," I thought, "I'll trace the descendants of William the Conqueror." FOOL!! Armed with a pile of books on Norman and Medieval history from the local library, I began to construct a detailed table of the Norman Kings of England and their various branches. I should have realised from the very beginning what I was getting in to - but no! Feeling pleased with myself, I moved on to the Plantagenets. There are one heck of a lot of Plantagenets! Apart from a brief period towards the end of the 15th century when they were hell-bent on killing each other (also known, somewhat picturesquely, as The Wars of the Roses), they peppered their seed pretty liberally through the nobility of England, Wales, Scotland, Europe and even Ireland. I kept coming across the dreaded words "and had issue." After two years I ...Read More