In the footsteps of my father and of his father...

It is with a mixture of great trepidation, and of great anxiety, that I delve into that part of family history which initiated my interest in genealogy. Anxiety as, as with all genealogical research, unearthing the past, especially one's personal past, is always an exciting and rewarding experience. Trepidation as I know that my father had already gone this way, and gave up on it a couple of years back.

As briefly explained in The Spark, the passing away of my paternal grandfather landed an inheritance of part of a field in the lap of my father, who had to trace the owners and the third parties who were working the land. To explain this he had drawn out a small family tree which had spurred my interest in genealogy, as explained in that article.

I have now in my possession the details that my father received, as well as those that he uncovered over the ten years since he was trusted with its care and follow up by his four siblings. It is through inherited responsability, and through personal interest that I dare walk back into the past and read documents relating the details of such inheritance. I also have the original document from which the family tree sketched by father was extracted.

I was tempted to start a separate blog for this, but given its close links to my research and itself being an attempt to understand past documents and infer information, I beleive it still falls within the remits of this blog.