Something old: something new...

As family historians we get into the swing of paging through records, poring over documents, and scrutinising every last scrawl of handwriting for a crucial piece of evidence – in order to prove the existence of an ancestor, to verify their whereabouts, their identity, a slice of their life... It’s normal, isn’t it? It’s just ‘what we do’.

However, on reading David Annal’s case study this month, I was struck afresh just what an extraordinary endeavour we are all undertaking, when we go about doing our family history. The supreme dedication we employ to tracking down the details and learning how to decipher them. The massive optimism that the very paper we need will have survived the passage of time. The persistence year after year, to piece together the story of our roots and try to make sense of it all. I think that collectively we family historians are a pretty impressive bunch. For sheer perseverance and ingenuity I think there must be no beating us.

What’s more, we are a million miles removed from the dustydocument stereotype too, and I’m sure that most of us have digital skills to be proud of. This issue to ensure that we’re all making use of the full range of genealogy gadgets and apps etc, we are introducing a new series to Family Tree – to run over the coming months, to help us make the most of every sort of tool to help us find out more about the past. If you have a piece of kit that you’d like to tell us about – hardware, software, app, guide or whatever, please do email helen.t@family-tree.co.uk and we look forward to sharing the details in a future issue.