MY INTEREST IN FAMILY HISTORY

I'm not sure how my interest in genealogy started, although I have always been interested in history generally. I started investigating my family tree in 1989, some six years after the last of my grandparents had died. It would certainly have helped me significantly if I'd started asking questions when my grandparents were still alive. Luckily, my mother and her sister (Jean Mitchinson) both had good memories and quite a rich hoard of photographs - and my mother had always detailed the names of the people in her photos and where they were taken, which was a huge help.

So I have photographs of all my grandparents, all my great grandparents except my father's grandfather, James BYERS, and two of my great great grandparents, Thomas McGLASSON and Margaret COWAN. 

My paternal grandparents, George Byers and Florence May Anderson

My maternal grandparents, Archibald Hardie Anderson and Agnes Turnbull

My paternal great grandmother, Mary Jane Thomson

My paternal great grandparents, Robert Anderson and Dorothy Jane Johnson

My maternal great grandparents, Francis Turnbull Anderson and Helen Hardie

My maternal great grandparents, James Turnbull and Agnes McGlasson

My maternal great great grandparents, Thomas McGlasson and Margaret Cowan

As of today, I have a total of 3,001 people in my Byers family tree, not all directly related, but most of them are.

I found it easy at the start to add names and build up a generational picture of my family, but as time went on and the further back you go, the more difficult it became to find ancestors and to be sure that they were the correct individual.  Formal records of birth, marriages and deaths only began in Scotland in 1855, starting earlier in England - in 1837. So before these dates you have to rely on Parish Records, which are not always correct, if indeed you can find what you are looking for.

Back in 1989, you had to physically attend Register House in Princes Street, Edinburgh and manually go through the Indexes held and then ask a porter to fetch out the appropriate record, maximum of four at a time. Very laborious.

Nowadays, all the Scottish records are online, and although you have to pay a small amount to see each record, it's well worth it and all achieved from the comfort of your own home.  The English records are not digitised, so Certificates have still to be requested by post from the Records Office, at a cost of £9 each.

Because my paternal grandmother is from the Hetton-Le-Hole / Houghton-le-Spring area in County Durham, I have investigated her side of the family and found it easier to do so through the Ancestry UK website with a fair amount of information being obtained from this source.