About Me
“Hi, I'm Jane,
I became involved in genealogy over 30 years ago when a doctor suggested that my husband’s eye condition could be hereditary. I went back three generations and found no trace of it, but by then I was hooked. I started delving into my own family history, having remembered the half written autobiography and previously unseen photos that I had found in my father’s desk after he died in 1982. My mother kept telling me to stop. She seemed to be afraid that I might reveal some family secrets but, of course, that made me more eager to find them and, the more I discovered about the lives of my ancestors, the more passionate I became about family, local and social history.
Most of my working life has involved research and report writing and, being naturally inquisitive and tenacious, I have an instinct that often leads to finding information in less well-known sources that might otherwise be overlooked.
I have lived on the border of Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire for most of my life and a great deal of my working life has been spent all over East Anglia so I have extensive local knowledge, as well as familiarity with the genealogical sources that are available.
I am happy to take on small projects, from a simple ‘look-up’ or fact check to full-scale projects involving several generations of a family tree.
”
Jane, Age 4
Qualifications
I am also passionate about learning so I decided to study with Pharos for the Family History Skills and Strategies Intermediate Certificate, followed by the Advanced Certificate, which I passed with Distinction. These courses included theory and practical work covering a wide range of genealogical sources. Going much further than censuses, civil and parish registers, they included wills, deeds, chancery records, occupational records, military records, local government, migration, poor law, manorial documents and palaeography, as well as teaching how to research in archives and to write reports.
