In the early 1990s my daughter inherited a Family History box from a cousin of mine with the same name.  Later we had a cousins' reunion and my husband decided to investigate the information and put it onto a tree which he had received free on a computer magazine.  The box contained a copy of Annie Camilla's Family History, letters, photos, and bits and pieces.

This got Peter interested in my family history so when we got the opportunity of a timeshare in Edinburgh he was delighted as it meant we could start delving into my ancestry.  I was not impressed.  A week in Edinburgh and we were going to be spending it with our noses in old books and documents!  Not my idea of a holiday.

A couple of days amongst the papers showed my ancestors had left lots of footprints and I was hooked.  We have since spent quite a few holidays doing research and even when we have decided to just do the touristy things we have found out even more about my ancestors.

The tree is now 7000 names long and we have now started to delve into my Mother's ancestry.  Who Do You Think You Are?  has given us some clues to her "block". It looks like he was a Jew who came over to England as a labourer in a sugar refinery in London in the late 1850s but soon became a butler in Bath where he married with an Anglisised version of his name: Johann Carl Heinrich Meyer.  By the time he died he owned a Tap Room in the centre of Bath by the river.  Was it he who was the "cigar manufacturer" from Austria that my grandmother used to talk of?  Or was it his Father. The fact is he was born in Hannover, Leven according to the Census records of 1871.  But we haven't managed to get any further with him yet.

My husband has recently started his family history and has discovered that his ancestor whom he understood came from Manchester, in fact come from just 2 miles up the road from where we live, purely by chance, now.  And all his ancestry appears to be in the surrounding villages and yet we are living 55 miles from where he was born and grew up.

It's a small world - and these web sites make it smaller:  we both now have distant cousins who share a common ancestor with us back many generations.  Sharing information with them has grown the tree very quickly.

Anyone who wants to share, please contact me HelenEMound@aol.com