Ther Williamses, or at least my lot, come from somewhere up a hill near Llandinam in Mid Wales by all accounts. Look you.I only found that out fairly recently. Not long, in fact, after I wrote a piece saying how beautiful the windfarm above the village looked. Apparently the locals - and among them a few of the rellies I guess - were up in arms, so I’ve obviously lost something in terms of race memory.
The maternal half are Woottons and Sadlers and Harrises from Cheshire by way of Essington, just outside Wolverhampton.
This we know thanks to my dad’s - well hobby doesn’t quite do it justice - it was an obsession to be fair, with genealogy: Families, where they come from and where are they now, especially the ones you’d never heard of before.
A new series of Who Do You Think You are will set everyone off again.
And when the bug bites, it puts a nasty nip on your ankles and won’t let go. I am fighting it at the moment. Being the one with the genealogy programme on the iMac, I am semi-official conservator of the Williams- Harris line.
If you remember the sci-fi film Enemy Mine with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jnr (if not, look it up at www.imdb.com/title/tt0089092/) I’ll be the one who has to recite the family lineage come the awful day. I’ll be the one who has to speak with some authority on unknown Aunty Gladys from Clun and the like.
If you find yourself saddled with this enormous responsibility, you’ll need to know where to look.
As mentioned above, www.ancestry.co.uk is as good a place as any to start, but as you can tell when a Google search of the word ‘genealogy’ returns more than 50 million pages, you’re never alone with the ancestors.
Ancestry.co.uk will give you a 14-day free trial of their services which includes access to the UK census for each of the decades 1841 to 1901, parish records and births and deaths records going back 100 years or more.
Just a warning, though, I was three pages into the registration process and still hadn’t found out how much the service costs after the 14-day free trial.
Another site, Genes Reunited at www.genesreunited.co.uk, from the people who brought you the phenomenally successful Friends Reunited site, claims to offer a free service, although again you have to register for a site which appears to have a significantly smaller database than the Ancestry offering.
My search for grandma Harriet Harris found 480 matches on Genes Reunited as compared with nearly 3,000 on Ancestry, which also has links to American and Canadian databases.
At least The Genealogist at www.thegenealogist.co.uk is completely up front about its charges.
For £4.66 a month you can access a service which claims to have “the widest coverage: 1127 to 2005″ but of what it doesn’t say. Nor does it say what the coverage is like after five past eight.
There . . . a little clock joke to keep you going, because once you start, time will fly.
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