By way of a beginning.

A blog for both my own entertainment and for my extended family and Young Relations to be able to see where they come from and can remember.      

                                                                   September, 2011.

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Genealogy - the Great Obsession.  Well... I have learned how to spell the word, at least, but it quickly does become an obsession, that much I can confirm.  One day you are vaguely interested in it then  <bang>  you're up to your ears in dry English Censuses and juicy tales from the Isle of Portland.  And a wonderfully humorous discovery I've made is that the old Portland relations all 'lived in sin' as a matter of course before marriage.  This regional custom even gets a mention in Havelock Ellis's magnum opus Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volumes 1-6, in volume 6.   More on that later.

So!  Smugglers, modern-style relationships before the age of Victoria, along with traces of beloved great-grandparents and aunts & uncles still remembered by Dear Old Mum and A.R.  How far can this all go with just sitting in front of a computer in Canada, I keep asking myself.  This is what I am in the process of finding out, and it is pure magic.  Soon, I will have to pay to subscribe to a professional genealogy website, but there is much still to be learned for free.  And I'm only at the first branch of the massive family tree.

On my most recent trip to England with Mum, we were taken around the old family haunts by my mother's sister and her husband.  On different outings fanning out from Bournemouth we went around the Isle of Portland, Chesil Beach, Weymouth, Swanage, Durlston, Lytchett Matravers, Cranborne, and some other places of which I missed the significance, alas, because there were sometimes three voices telling three stories at once in the car - and I was thoroughly enjoying that, without being able to keep any of it in my head for future reference.

New Forest Donkey

So, why now?  Why join the hordes of the genealogically-obsessed?

It all started with the delivery of 50 box-loads of books belonging to a stranger who had died recently, and through my father's literacy connections, ended up in the sorting depot of my enclosed front porch.  On a  hot August Saturday evening, a glass of wine at hand, I began to sort through these books.  The name of the lady to whom they had belonged was inscribed in several of them and it turned out that she had been someone I knew from work, and so the next day when I was still thinking about her, I found her obituary on the internet.  From there, piecing together what I had gleaned and searching her English connections further, I found that she was a relative of one of the pioneers of medical radiation therapy.  This was exciting stuff!  And it was so easy to find.  Then, I suddenly stopped myself and thought - this is stupid - how about seeing how easy it is to look up my own family.

The only soul I could remember of my ancient relatives that day at work, was the wonderfully named Isabella Bathsheba Pearce of the Isle of Portland.  It had been about four months since I'd been taken to where my great-great grandmother came from, and the name had stuck in my imagination.  And would I be able to find a single reference to her on the internet?  The answer was: yes.  And so it began...

In honour of my late, adored maternal grandmother, and the memories she passed on from her mother and grandmother to my mother and aunts - I begin with the first branch of the tree through matrilineal descent.