Tom Wood has been a fixture of Family Tree since the early days, not long after founder Michael Armstrong decided to set up a magazine for family historians on his kitchen table in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, back in 1984.
Tom was a founder member of Lincolnshire Family History Society in 1990 and was its first, award-winning, magazine editor, also editing the Family History Federation (formerly Federation of Family History Societies) magazine. A member of the Society of Genealogists and Guild of One-Name Studies, it comes as no surprise that he was such a knowledgeable contributor to the then-named Family Tree Magazine when it was a mere sapling. A look in the Family Tree archives shows that he penned a Family History for Beginners column for several years (Tom also wrote the book, An Introduction to British Civil Registration in the early 1990s), Christmas quizzes and more as well as his ‘Genealogical Miscellany’ column, which evolved into the Dear Tom that has entertained and inspired readers for so many years.