Family Tree

I have been spending many an hour on an ancestory website, putting together the Evans family tree. Starting with a few birth, marriage and death certificates my mum had I continued by scouring online records. Ordering a couple of birth certificates along the way enabled a dead end to be opened and a correct household in a census to be confirmed. You'd be amazed at how within a fairly local area you can find two families of 4 or 5 members with the same set of names. Having surnames in the tree which include Evans, Williams and Stephens doesn't help! My mum's side had some more unique surnames but has been hampered by her mum being French.

Anyway I have currently got 84 entries on the tree going back to Great, Great, Great Grandparents in 1799.

The process is quite addictive (in an oh god its 2.30am kinda way ) and it takes much patience and perseverance to extract the necessary facts by combining data from multiple sources. Its very easy to get the wrong records or make some information 'fit' for the purpose of convenience. If you don't get corroborating information from at least 2 sources there is a high probability you'll have the wrong person, but it may not become apparent until you've spent hours going down the wrong path.

I became suspicious this had happened when ancestors which had for generations, lived within a few miles of one village in North Wales started living in London's East end. And although it would have been interesting to have had a great great uncle who'd served 5 years in Pentonville, it was probably better to have spotted the error 2 generations later and eventually find that said great, great uncle was a shepherd who lived within a few miles of aforementioned village in North Wales!