Are you more than a TICK IN A BOX?

Many of us carrying out our family history research will have started for a particular reason. For some of us it might have been to try to fill in a perceived gap within the received knowledge of our family, whether through the vague curiosity of just wanting to know, or as a means to resolve a huge chasm in the story, for example, if an adopted child. For others the interest might be for the hope of finding some ‘lost money’ or a famous connection from which some benefit or reflected glory might be obtained! Whatever our motivations, one thing that most of us will soon come to realise is that in searching for our ancestors, we are in fact searching for aspects of ourselves, for some need that we have yet to see fulfilled, whether consciously or subconsciously. But whilst family history can be a powerful tool to help us crack the mysteries of who we are, it can at times also misdirect and confuse, it can lead us astray, and in some cases can absolutely shatter any sense of identity that we may think we have.

My father served as a submariner within the Royal Navy, and as a young child my family moved around a lot. Within days of my birth in the Northern Irish town of Larne in 1970 we had moved to Scotland, where I spent four years living in Helensburgh, close to the Faslane naval base. A brother and sister were duly born there, before we then moved to Plymouth in England. For four years I attended my first school