Last week I read a post on one of my favourite blogs Learning To Walk In Stilettos about how the author was researching her family tree. This is something that I have been doing off and on for the past two years with some success. Well, until one of my aunts pointed out that one of my would be great great great grandfathers couldn’t possibly be who I thought he was as he would have had to fathered his child at a ridiculously young age. That put a spanner in the works for a while, until reading that blog post reminded me how much I enjoyed doing researching my own tree and I dove back into it last week forsaking all other things (aside from work and the blooming gym).

Why bother researching family tree? Well, I think it felt like a natural thing to do after I started developing stronger bonds with my family about two years ago. When I moved to America I wasn’t that close to my family. I cared about them of course but I had stand off relationships with most of them other than my parents through my own choice. I don’t know why really - perhaps having always been fiercely independent, I just didn’t feel the need to be in contact with them much especially my brother or my three sisters. It’s not until recently that I have made a huge effort to be an active part of their lives (no easy task being 5000 + miles away) but what a rewarding that experience has been.

One of my sisters was going through a crisis recently and it was devastating to me almost as much as it was to her - an odd experience really but I have been able to comfort her which has helped us both. Another one of my sisters also was going through a tough time in resulting in her moving back into the family home. Not a huge problem - after all the fridge is always full and my parents are easy going, but for someone trying to carve out a life for herself, I think it feels like a step backwards. ‘It’s not going backwards,’ I told her, ‘it’s regrouping’.

And so now researching my family tree is like an obsession for me - I sat at our dining room table every night last week after work (see photo) and trawled through Ancestry.com trying to figure out who was who, whether they could or couldn’t be related to me and what the next step might be. It’s kind of like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and being a master sleuth rolled into one. I am not sure if I will be related to as many famous people as sjsmart is but it’s fun regardless although rumour has it we maybe related to General Wolfe (he lead the British against the French to establish British rule of Canada). I hope to make books out of all the information eventually that can be treasured by the family and added to as it grows for generations to come.