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Week 25: Fast #52Ancestorsin52weeks

 I started researching my own family tree in the 1980s. As far as I knew, no-one had ever put anything like it down on paper for either my dad's side (McAra) or my mum's side (Anderson). The resources that were readily available were few and only accessible with a lot of planning and some luck. Being initially armed with names of my grandparents but not much else, I had to set off for a whole day out at New Register House in Edinburgh where Scotland's records were housed. It was NOT fast! Getting up early to drive to the station to catch a train, paying the fee required for a daily search, sitting at a desk filling in forms with the person's name, possible dates/locations, handing that over to an archivist/librarian, then waiting patiently until she returned with a microfilm that you then had to scroll through manually on a reader, hoping you didn't miss anything .... It was a long process, certainly not a fast one and one which, if you were lucky, by the end of the day, you might have gleaned a name or two, a date or two or sometimes nothing. It was a slow process and slow progress was made over those early years.

FAST forward 40 years .......  Things have changed!

Take last week for example. I had come across a fairly new DNA match on Ancestry. Not a particularly close match, but one I could see was most likely related to me through my Anderson line. Their family tree had only 9 people in it and even a couple of those were still living, so no names,  and the others had no locations and only a couple of dates. But even with that small amount of information, I was able to go to the Scotlands People website and use their flexible search criteria to start to build that tree back and within a few minutes I had established that the people in at least one of the lines were from places in Lanarkshire that my own ancestors were living.  A couple of minutes - that's FAST! Less than an hour later, I had extended their tree back three or four generations on two of the four lines. A piece of research that would have taken me literally years before the advent of the internet and the masses of online resources that are available nowadays. FAST work thanks to modern technology.

But FAST work doesn't always mean good genealogy. It is so easy for those beginning their genealogical journey to get carried away when sites like Ancestry offer 'hints' to a possible ancestor. Some people just take it as gospel and add 'John Smith born in 1875 in Shotts' to their tree, when their actual ancestor is 'John Smith born in 1876 in Shotts' or even 'John Smith born in 1875 in Edinburgh'. Hints need checking out. Sources need to be found - it's so easy to copy someone else's information, especially if it looks as if they have more and better information than you. SLOW and steady genealogy is better in the long run for everyone concerned.


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