Over the past twenty years I have researched several branches of my family, including the Pickles, Bedford and Gidlow families. My research has taken me through parish records, birth and death certificates, historical documents, local history libraries and archives. Some records have been difficult to interpret, particularly older documents written in Latin.
When the records do not tell the whole story
One of the hardest things I found was researching my great-grandfather, who was adopted. The story in the family was that his parents had died and he had been brought up by another family. But when I started to delve into it, the records did not match the story.
I found out his father did die when he was about six or seven. His mother lived on until 1925, by which point he was in his late twenties. But she had ended up in the workhouse. The workhouse was like the social security of the Victorian era. If you could not support yourself, you went there. It was almost like a prison. They put a roof over your head and gave you food, but you had to work to stay there.
She had lost all her family support. Her mother was still living, but she had been abandoned. The children scattered. One ended up in a children's home. I could find the bare bones in the records, but I could not find the full picture of why.
Records can tell you what happened, but understanding why people made certain decisions is often much harder. The personal aspects of things are difficult to find out.
Common names and unfamiliar places
Another challenge is when you get a common surname and you end up with more than one baptism or birth that could be the right person. You are trying to connect it back in time, but you have got three John Smiths and you do not know which one is yours. Sometimes you just have to draw a line.
One of the thrills of family history is that it is often like a mystery or a chess puzzle you have to solve. You piece together clues from different sources — parish records, certificates, census returns, DNA matches — and sometimes the pieces do not fit where you expect them to. You have to think several steps ahead, consider different possibilities, and be prepared to rethink your approach when the evidence does not line up. That is what makes it so rewarding when you finally crack it.