General Chat

Months ago a family member decided to go hunting for the lost evidence of our family history. At first it was slow as not much info was known to us. The now familiar ' it's rude to ask questions' manner with which generations have lived was an unspoken rule we all seem to have accepted. But digging through archives , black and white evidence , proves these people exist/existed. Unfortunately it also has downsides , people often had 11 plus children, therefore the youngest of those would probably not get to know their parents as well as they should. Or one/both would succumb to illness or death. It has been an uplifting and also depressing experience learning each new episode. Having left it so long to search for my lost family , finding addresses where they once lived sometimes only a short distance from where I am today, most of these places are no longer the same or have been demolished. My despair is that I have no photographs of all the missing. So do ask questions before your own history gets lost :-(

Well said.
Many of us didn't take up this hobby until after our more elderly relatives had died. Even if we'd asked or been told about our family history, we were often too young to ask the 'right' questions or to even remember what we'd been told.

I asked but either got no answer or complete falsehoods. By sheer determination I have worked out relations and all the skeletons in the cupboards that go with them :-D :-D

as you say, "right questions"

OR.............even to "bring up" the relevant questions..........such as ......

I never considered asking my maternal grandmother how many children, she had given birth to,( my younger cousin, did)

or what relatives did my other grandmother have?


I didn't know, that there were other branches on our family until my mum came out with..Oh! THAT lott, (family names in the phone book) we don't have anything to do with them!!!

Bob ...................

I had a similar experience ........... , a couple of weeks after I started at high school at the age of 11, a teacher said "oh, we have another girl called xxxxxxx (correct surname) in a higher form. Are you related?"

I said no ............. then went home and asked Dad

That's the OTHER lot, we don't have anything to do with THEM!


Of course, as I have discovered, they were related!



but to go back to the earlier questions .....

........ we were raised not to ask questions. My maternal grandfather served in WW1, but we were never to ask him about it.

We were never to ask questions about early lives of those grandparents ............ it was only after I started this family history lark that I've discovered how many siblings each of my maternal grandparents had.

I never knew either of my father's parents ........... his father died in 1914, his mother a couple of years before I was born. All that was ever said about the father was "that was a happy release for grandmother. He was a drunkard." .......... and that was said by some older cousins who'd only heard about the story from grandmother. My dad and his siblings never mentioned granddad's name.

We were brought up on the maxim that children were to be seen but not heard

When I started looking into my family history back in 2001 I didn't even know both grandmothers maiden names .

Found many skeletons in the cupboard since then like very premature babies coming along soon after a marriage etc .or marriages much later than expected .

I also asked, and was fobbed off.

I never knew my paternal grandmother's siblings. I knew she had at least one brother... who was a half brother (I didn't understand that expression when I was a child).... but they didn't get on.... because he thought his sister was "stuck-up"... he referred to her as The Duchess.

I now know that gran had 3 sisters (I've found info for two), and at least 2 half-sisters.... but I have no idea of the name of the brother.

She never spoke of her family.......... probably because her father died in the asylum!

Shirley ..................

I also did not know my grandmothers' maiden names when I started on this lark in 2003

I did know that my mother's mother had 2 sisters because we lived next door to one of them until I was 11, and the other was my mother's godmother so we kept receiving letters from Newark, NJ :-)

I didn't know there were several other siblings ............... and cousins I knew nothing about!