My mother was the person to turn to if you wanted to know special dates of anyone in the family or how many children did aunty have and their names. If mum did not know the dates of birth that far back, at least she would know how old they were.

A sad day fell on our family in 1999. The fountain of knowledge (mum) passed away, leaving her retired husband (dad). My brother and I were concerned as we do not live local to dad - what he was going to do with his time as mum was no longer with us?

We hit upon the idea of finding our ancestors, doing the old genealogy trail.
We all had

the same thought when we put this idea to dad as a hobby to keep him occupied, why did we not ask mum before she left this world? There was no family bible or book that we knew of with dates of the family s births, marriages or deaths to help us on our way, so we had to start from scratch, with just our memories.

Dad, my brother and I agreed to write to members of the family, who lived all over the country, to ask them for information and thoughts on our family. We had some replies and some just ignored us - what were they trying to hide?

We started in the summer of 1999 and have

not stopped looking for long lost ancestors; it is just like detective work, checking and cross checking to verify that the person you have found is definitely your ancestor. We have enjoyed tracing our ancestors to the extent that we have found some skeletons in the cupboard - like a policeman that was sacked in the early 1900 for stealing fruit from a shop, which will have taught him a valuable lesson - eat the evidence next time!

The moral to this is get the elders to write it all down even if you are not interested - it will be useful later.

Warning! Searching for your [http://1800bestbuy.com/familytree.php]ancestors can be addictive.