THE EARLY YEARS
In November
1992, my mother rang and asked me if I would trace the family history, and I
agreed. At that time, I only had a very vague idea how to set about tracing our
ancestors. I thought that you paid a visit to St. Catherine’s House in London;
looked through some files and that would be that. How wrong I was proved to be.
Mom had mentioned that one of my
cousins had the necessary documents that I would need to get me started. I
wrote to her asking for copies of anything she might have that she thought
would help me. Not hearing anything in the following weeks, I forgot all about
it until April 1993 when my mother rang and asked me what progress I was
making. I felt ashamed and promptly rang my cousin, who lives in Kings Heath,
Birmingham, and asked her if she would help me. On ascertaining that all the
old documents were in her loft, I told her that I would telephone again in a
few days to see how she was getting on. Realising that I needed to know how to
do the research, I bought a booklet on the subject. This proved to be a mine of
information and I discovered that various libraries now hold the St.
Catherine’s House records on microfiche.
One Saturday in May, armed with
the information, a notepad, and pen, my husband John and myself decided to
visit Central Library in Birmingham. Ascertaining at the information desk that
the Genealogy department was on the sixth floor, we made our way via the
escalators much to John's disgust, as he prefers the lift.
We found the assistants
extremely helpful and were soon set up with the correct census file. I found it
amazing that so many people resided in one house at that time, and was also
intrigued to see the various descriptions of the professions held by members of
the family. On that occasion we didn’t have any luck with the search, but I
consoled myself with the thought that at least I now knew how to set about it,
and resolved to return at the first opportunity.
Over the next few weeks, I
visited the library a number of times and met a lot of people engaged on
similar searches; all as enthralled by the past as I was. I quickly realised I
was hooked. The more I found out, the more I wanted to know. Not only did I
want to trace my family, I also wanted to know the type of clothes they wore, what
their houses looked like, and anything else I could discover. This led to me
buying a number of books in the course of my research and spending a lot of
time in the reference section of Central Library.
The next step was to find out if
anyone in the family had photographs of older family members; my father
mentioned that one of his brothers, my Uncle Leonard, had a fantastic
collection. I hadn’t seen Leonard for many years and at that time he wasn’t on
the telephone, so I took the bull by the horns and wrote asking if I could
perhaps borrow a few of his old photographs. To my delight, he wrote back
saying that he was planning a book himself, but he was quite prepared to loan
me some of his collection. Overjoyed, I wrote back immediately asking if we could
perhaps meet some time. Apparently, he too had been tracing the family tree on
his side of the family.
I mentioned to a friend that I had reached a standstill in
my research. She told me that Teletext ran a free family tree service.
Birmingham Girls
Available from :
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birmingham-Girls-Carol-Arnall-ebook/dp/B003YDXJO4/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=carol+arnall&qid=1558805166&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
