Aside from photography I am keen on family history research and over the years have done quite a lot of work to establish my own roots. It all started when I decided to find out how my uncle who was killed in action during WW2 died. I was living in London at the time and was able to go to the National Archives to search for the answer. It proved relatively easy, maybe I was just lucky, and so the seed was sown. I wrote an article about this and it was published in Practical Family History, January 2000 issue. The article can be found in the sub menu to this page.

I think everyone hopes to find someone famous or infamous in their family tree but so far anyone meeting this criteria has eluded me. Apart from the baby murderer…….

Genealogy is big in the US and there are many who post messages on online groups who claim to be descended from royalty and have the “documentation” to prove it. This may be true in some cases but in the majority they may well have “lifted” some spurious information from a genealogy website that has been placed there by someone who in turn has uploaded unsubstantiated facts.

One of the prime objects in genealogy is to verify facts where possible from the actual records. As the vast majority of my ancestors are Scottish it is much easier to do this through the Scotland’s People website – www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. I do, however, have some English blood from from my 5x great grandfather who was a soldier from Essex who was garrisoned in Perth for a time.