| A working approach to family history |
| By Ken (Wato) Watling |
| The first step is to arm yourself with a note book and pencil, take yourself off the the Family History Centre in London where you trawl through the index's recording every Watling name you find from 1837 to 2002, that is 165 years, which are in 4 quarterly volumes, which equals 660 large, heavy books weighing anything up to 10 lb. each. | |||||
| At the family History Centre you can expect to fight for a place to rest the books on in order to examine them, be called, or to call other people rude names,because you have the book they want, or because they have the book you want. | |||||
| That is not all, there are sections for births, marriages and deaths, this now multiplies your task by 3, making it 1980 books to look through, then allowing for mistakes you can round that up to at least 2000 books. | |||||
| You will not do the stupid thing that I did, start at 1837 and work forward, you will be smart and start at 2002 and work backwards, if you are wise you will take a flask of coffee, sandwiches and several spare pencils. | |||||
| You will end up sneezing with runny eyes from dust mites and develop muscles in your arms like a navvies, you will possibly need reading glasses and get rheumatics in the hands before you complete the task, this should keep you fully occupied for the next ten years. | |||||
| Having done all that, you return home and enter everything in to your computor from which you then try and corrolate the births, marriages and deaths. | |||||
| You then create a system where you can identify family groups and check these against the various census. | |||||
| You then become very knowledgable and a bit of an expert on the subject | |||||
| Finally
you end up completely stark raving bonkers like me. Ken (Wato) Watling. |
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