Welcome to My Blog

Welcome to my blog. I admit it—I am crazy about genealogy. It all started when my husband gave me a subscription to Ancestry.ca for my birthday last year, and I have not looked back. My plan is for this to be a blog about my experience of my family history research, with a focus on stories about my most interesting and even fascinating predecessors. At this point, after exploring my family history in depth for a little over a year, I really want a place to share my findings beyond Ancestry.ca. I am Canadian, and my family’s story in Canada goes back over a hundred and sixty years, yet I am sure that the vast majority of people to whom I am related, and who are alive today, live in England and the United States.

Some of the surnames I have been researching are, on my maternal side, Sanderson, Saunders, Sanders, Cook, Green, Lefevre, Johnson, Goff, Goff or Newbery (yes, all three names are one surname), Farrent, Plowright, Newton, Remington, Cross, Banes, Baines, Leverington, and Smart. These family lines are mainly British, however, Lefevre is Huguenot in origin. The counties involved include Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Somerset, Devon and Dorset. One of my great grandfathers was a British Home Child who joined the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Another was a railroad worker from Cambridgeshire who realized his lifelong dream of becoming a cowboy.

On my father’s mother’s side, I descend from folks from Yorkshire, England, in the nineteenth century, via Illinois to Alberta, Canada. These are the Marlows, Bosomworths, Dickensons, and Johnsons.

My father’s paternal grandmother’s family are from Northern Ireland and Germany, the former coming to Canada during the potato famine (Crawfords and Diamonds), and the latter likely descended from a Hessian solider in the American Revolution who changed sides (Monks and Muencks).

I am fascinated by my father’s paternal grandfather’s lines, which all lead back to the earliest days of colonial America, including the Mayflower. These are the Harts, Merriams, Wrights, Scidmores, Rossiters, Tabers, Cookes, and Warrens, to name but a few. The states where they lived include New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Five of my several times great grandfathers fought in the American Revolution. One was at Lexington and Ticonderoga.

I am excited to share my adventures in genealogy with you, and my hope is to engage the interest to those who do not share a passion for genealogy as such, but who want to know the highlights of our mutual family history. Another hope is to share the process of learning about how to do genealogy in this day and age of being able to find so much on line. It continues to astound me how much you can actually discover.

My plan is not to use the names of living people without their permission, or to reveal sensitive material that is a little too recent, which could even be from a century ago.

I will not be citing my sources fully in my postings, as doing this would have been a barrier to writing what I hope will be a near daily blog. I have cited my sources in detail on Ancestry.ca, so if you need more information about my sources, you can visit my "public" tree there if you have a subscription, or you can contact me by email.

Many thanks to Louise Louise Cooke and her Family History: Genealogy Made Easy podcast for her step by step instructions in how to create a family history blog. I have learned so much from this podcast and also her Genealogy Gems podcast, of which I am a premium member.

Also, I wish to thank Thomas MacEntee for his inspiring Geneabloggers podcast.

Welcome, and enjoy. I look forward to our future connections, and to meeting cousins I never knew about.  Please feel free to comment and share. Join me as we “time travel through the centuries” together.