Collins tracing your family history [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Long before there were computer programmers and engineers, blacksmiths or even farmers, our ancestors told each other stories of who they were and where they came from. Over time, as other subjects became more important (or at least seemed to be), our ancestral tales began to take a back-burner, the older ones blurring into creation myths but the more recent ones remaining important to their tellers and listeners. ^ The rise of written records heralded a gradual erosion of oral traditions. ^ V My gieat-great-giandparents, Albert Joseph Adolph and his wife Emily Lydia, née Watson. When I started my research, they were as far back as my grandfather's memory stretched. When memories started to be written down, one of the first things to be recorded were ancient genealogies, linking the living to their ancient roots. It is for that reason that we can trace the Queen's ancestry back through the Saxon royal family to their mythological ancestor, the god Woden. Yet for most, the rise of written records heralded a gradual erosion of oral traditions and, in medieval England, memories tended to grow shorter in proportion to the proliferating roUs of veUum and parchment recording our forebears' deeds, dues and misdemeanours. And then, just as it became apparent to our ancestors that they were losing touch with the past, it crossed people's minds that these selfsame documents, compiled for no better reason than to record land transfer, coiurt cases or tax habUity could help us retrace our past and discover the identities of our forgotten forebears. This, the act of tracing family roots through both remembered stories and written records, is genealogy, the subject that has preoccupied most of my life, first as an amateur and later as a professional ever since, as a child, I encoimtered the pedigrees of elves and hobbits at the back of The Lord of the Rings. And it has been my good fortune that the past few decades have been ones of exceptional growth in genealogy as a pastime across the world, from a minority interest with snobby overtones in the 1960s to a mainstream activity, contributing significantly to the tourist industry and constituting one of the principal uses of the Internet. In recent decades, it has broken through, too, into the media.