What family info did you have before you started genealogy?

[coombs]

Such as the family stories of your grandparents, or even documents you looked at before you were bitten by the genealogy bug?

I remember my nan saying her mum died on her 50th birthday in 1945, and her maiden name was Edgington.

And mum saying her mum was born in County Durham, whose mum Catherine Musgrave before her died in about 1930.

And dad said that his paternal grandad was Richard Titshall who was originally from Suffolk and moved to Essex and ran a boot menders in Rochford.

Also I knew about the Cornwell family of Essex, and a rumour that turned out to be true about a London ancestor. All this helped me a lot on my way.

[KGarrad]

Both of my grandfathers had died before I was born.
And my father's half-sister and half-brother never had any children - so no cousins.

So, I was curious about my surname.

Within a short time I had found that my paternal grandfather had, in fact, married 3 times. He divorced his 2nd wife to marry my gran. Skeletons at the first attempt

From that point I was hooked!

Them there was the story of us having French blood?

[groom]

What really started me was my uncle mentioning that his grandmother had died following the HMS Albion disaster on the Thames in June 1898. I then remembered that my grandmother had told me that her mother had been rescued from the water but died a week later and that they had looked after a boy who had lost his parents. I knew my grandmother's maiden name, so looked up information about the disaster and found her mother's name on the communal grave at the HMS Albion memorial in East London Cemetery. That then started my interest in family history.

My grandmother also used to say that she was related to a Bobby Howell who was a famous band leader. I still can't find anything about this apart from the fact that her brother was called Robert  (but it wasn't him)

[Milliepede]

That great great was run out of Sheffield by the police  but have never found any evidence of this.  If he ran fast enough maybe there wouldn't be any evidence anyway.

Family stories may be embellished over the years but very often have a grain of truth in them.

[djct59]

I knew a bit of the family history, and that my grandfather had gone to South Africa as his mother was widowed in 1878  when he was a child, and she ran the croft for the rest of her life.

In 1989, the year after my mother died quite young, her youngest brother died in a house fire that destroyed her birthplace. I drove her alcoholic older sister to the funeral. She was old enough to remember her grandmother, who lived till 1929. According to her, my g-grandfther collapsed in a field with peritonitis and died within days, as the doctor had to come by boat (there was no road to the village till 1883). Years later, this turned out to be true.

Twenty two years later the last of my mother's siblings died aged 89, so the cousins began to share memories etc. The rest was literally history.

[genjen]

As a small child I was somewhat bewildered by the fact that my mother had a Granny Frost, who wasn't her real granny but was that of her two big sisters. I was too young to work out the implications of this. My mum's real granny was called Granny Smith, which we all know is, in fact, an apple.

Hooked from then onwards.....

[Beavances]

Mine started with the unearthing of two photographs - one showing a wedding around 1900 and the other a house which had not long been completed  before the photograph had been taken (very newly planted garden was the clue) but had a child standing in front of it dressed in Victorian clothes. My mother-in-law knew who the house belonged too and whose wedding it was but nothing else about the  background of the people. In trying to identify the house I went to the library in Otley, Yorkshire to ask if they had any old documents/maps  that might help me. The librarian simply said 'Oh I know where that is. I pass it every day on the bus!'  She then gave directions (...just up the road and along a bit) ...  and then I became hooked. If only it was always that simple!

[LizzieW]

I knew quite a lot of my mother's family history.  I knew her mother (my gran) as she lived with us and I knew her father had died from TB not long after my mother's eldest sister also died of TB.  I knew the names of my mother's grandmothers, my mother's elder sisters knew them personally but they'd died by the time my mum was born.  I knew one of them was married to an alcoholic and that she had been rich (although I didn't know why she was rich) but her husband drank all her money away.  That all turned out to be true, she had been left gold, silver, tenements etc. in an elderly lady's will.  I knew lots of names of my mother's cousins and aunts and uncles.

Eventually, all I had to do was put them all together to start my tree on my mother's maternal side.  Then, I was given a tree someone else had done (I actually met him) taking my mother's paternal side back 4 generations, although I have researched it much more widely since then.

[genjen]

I also knew that my mum's dad had been killed in an industrial accident and that her mum had died at a relatively young age, leaving mum to bring up her two younger brothers. I had to know that because they lived with us - more like big brothers to me than uncles.

I knew that dad came from Aberdeen and that his younger brother was killed during WW2 at an age when he ought still to have been in school. I knew that three of dad's aunts were Pansy, Tootie and Nettie, though they were all, in reality, called something else altogether more sober and sensible. I have yet to work out why they had those nicknames!

What I didn't know was that my research would take me from Nairn in the North of Scotland to Portsea in the South of England, with many points in between and that in the end, my earliest known maternal ancestors (to date) were living in my own chosen county - Cumbria - or that another line, having gone all around Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland, would bring me back to within a very few miles of where I was born.