Ioften refer to family history as the hobby (call that lifestyle!) that never stops giving. No matter how long you’ve been researching, and how thorough you think you’ve been, going back over the same ground is never wasted time. Take parish registers for instance. Once, we had to travel to see the originals in Diocesan Registries, if they had been deposited, and then only if we had a clue where to look. Archivists soon realised the precious tomes were being handled far too often and gave us microfilm instead, often blurry, sometimes incomplete, for which we were all profoundly grateful at the time.
Somewhere in my boxes of notes is a battered exercise book filled with barely decipherable scribble from my very first encounter with ‘real’ family history, just about 40 years ago in Warwick Record Office. Humbly polite, as the instruction manuals of the day recommended, I’d timidly applied at the counter for the parish records of the village of Wolvey, in my innocence entering all of the card index accession numbers on the form provided. Some moments later, a pleasant young lady appeared at my table staggering under a stack of dusty volumes which she piled on the desk beside me and left with a murmured ‘just ask if you need anything’.