My genealogy addiction commenced in 1982 with a simple question “Dad, do you know whether your father is still alive?” By then, Grandfather Cox would have been in his early 80s. The reply was “I don’t know; I lost contact with him just after you were born and I have never heard from him since.” Dad gave me his permission to search records and do whatever else I had to do to find the answers. Much has happened since those … Continue reading
Following on from my previous blogs on “Thinking outside the box”, and the “Value of letters”, their use became invaluable, when I had to write a story about my father, Edgar Raymond Perrett. My father was on the hospital ship, “Centaur”, when it was torpedoed off the coast of Caloundra on the 14th May 1943. I was 21 months old so I never knew anything about my father. In 1995, I was asked to write a story about my father … Continue reading
Over the years, I have been gathering photos of places where I have lived as a means of documenting significant periods in my life. I can record changes in my life experiences as I’ve moved from my parents’ home to student accommodation to the rental market to private home ownership. I have also adopted this strategy in relation to as many of my ancestors as possible. Since the majority of these lived in England, I have relied greatly on online … Continue reading
The way in which you justify your conclusions concerning a branch of your family tree has much in common with a formalmathematical proof. Each one depends upon assembling demonstrated (and defensible) facts and then proceeding from them via a path of inexorable logic to an inevitable conclusion. But they share far more than that. Both a genealogical argument and a mathematical proof are deliberately structured to obscure the false starts, blind alleys and mistaken identifications that make each subject … Continue reading
