Resources

I have collected together the resources that I have used in my research or that may be useful in the future.

Resource list

First Steps

It seemed quite a big thing at the time; twenty years ago when I collected together my father's version of the family tree. It included his five siblings and my mother's five. It missed half-brothers from his father's first marriage but I knew nothing about that at the time.

In 1997-1998 the internet was in it's infancy so  few genealogical resources online compared with the youthful internet of today. The speed at which the resource has grown has for my generation hit us at the pace of a bullet train. Some have dodged it others have been blown aside. I'm lucky since I started my digital days in 1976 for commercial reasons and have continued to embrace it ever since. Some technical stuff but by and large I am just a very experienced user who sees it as a window on the world. And a means of doing and finding things that would either be impossible or just take too long to achieve.

In those early years I even resorted to sending letters by post with stamps. 

Having collected my father's stuff together. Mainly just living relatives from him so the next step was to pursue the search for my ancestors. My surname, Turner, is amongst the most common.  My knowledge of how things worked at that time was very flaky so decided to look for my Grandmother's maiden name. There were books around. A book about Bishop's Stortford which had a note to my grandmother as Beatrice Boncey. 

It struck me that Boncey was not a common name and I might find out more by looking through the telephone directory. This was then available online so I searched for the name found addresses and typed letters to a couple of dozen of them. I still have the letters I wrote and better still the replies. They were quite numerous and yielded some family history that my new found cousins had already discovered. 

And this helped enormously

The Guild of One-Name Studies approaches genealogical research in an alternative way to the standard method of following ancestral or descendant lines. Researchers record all occurrences of a name and record every detail. A database is built and then the data is organised into family groups where the evidence to validate the collection.

There is an obligation on members of the guild to share their knowledge and to incorporate information from people with information relating to their target name.

In The Beginning...

My father died in 1997. I was 54.

My father was only three years old when his father died in 1914. He was the youngest of six children born between 1901 and 1910. In 1914 at the time for my grandfather's death his wife, my grandmother was 33.

Before my father's death in 1996 he started a family tree. He never really got beyond his immediate relatives and mostly those still alive at the time. He never found his parents marriage; he assumed that they were married after the birth of his eldest sister so only searched before 1901.

I picked up where he left off and was hooked. At the time - late 90s records were beginning to appear on the internet but, compared to now, there was very little. The details of the story are in my family history still an ongoing project. 

The ancestral search has continued beyond my own. I have helped friends and acquaintances who have started trying to discover their roots but often hit a brick wall.

We, my wife Christine and I, moved to France in 2002 and I continued my genealogical research. Then I had a break. I stopped getting results so decided to wait and that turned out to be a few years. There were a few cursory searches and the odd contact with possible connections but not much until recently. We returned to the UK in 2014. 

I run a computer skills group for the local U3A (University of the Third Age)** and this led to taking a target based approach for the participants. Computer skills aren't much without an objective. 

This coincided with a growing interest amongst members of the U3A. So there genealogy met computer skills. 

I may get bored with my own family history but will never tire of those of others. I feel sometimes rather guilty; a peeping Tom; voyeuristic. But it is fascinating. No skeletons to uncover here about other people's cupboards but there is more to tell about mine as my family history unfolds.

With my interest rekindled I discovered a Futurelearn course. A Family History course run by the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. 

That led to me applying successfully to join their Post Graduate course "Genealogical, Palaeographic, and Heraldic Studies" with the same university. I have recently completed the first year. It has been absorbing, bewildering at times but certainly it has provided me with significantly greater knowledge and awareness of what is available. And, if you think there is a lot of information online, bear in mind that it has been suggested to me by two experienced and eminent archivists that only about 5% of the information potentially useful to genealogists, is available on the internet.

Michael Turner

2 October 2016

Updated 23 August 2017