RESEARCH... THEN AND NOW
About the author
Diane Lindsay has been addicted to family and local history for more years than she cares to admit, still teaches it to anyone who will listen, and often slips it cheekily into her creative writing class. She has enough brick walls to keep her going for many years and plans to live long enough to knock down every one. She finds it very hard to take herself too seriously.
Life was tidier in the old days of family history. If we were lucky, we found perhaps one fact every few weeks in the County Record Office. Or through a rare coach trip to Kew, the Society of Genealogists’ Library or draughty old St Catherine’s House, a modest crumb of information. Even when we came home with little more than an empty lunch box, aching feet and a crick in the neck it was always a wonderful day out. And later, after scouring all the How To books we’d hopefully bought, it took only minutes to neatly add the meagre new data to the working family tree.