How it began for me.

          In August 2009 I left to go on maternity leave from my job as a Police Criminal Intelligence Researcher/Analyst. My job involved studying crime trends, researching offences and creating profiles and reports on offenders. I loved my job and when I realised that it would not cover the cost of my childcare I was devastated to hand in my notice.

Within the first two weeks of having my daughter I missed work. I thought about the possibility of one day returning to work and I soon realised that having a few years out to have children, I am currently expecting my third, would make me less employable. In addition to this I felt stuck on a rung within my career which I would not be able to progress from for quite a while. This is where I decided to re-evaluate my skills and see what I could do which would accommodate having a family and continuous career development. One thing I was definitely good at was research.

After talking about this with my good friend Sam she expressed a wish that it would be great to research into her family tree. I immediately thought 'I can do that!'.

So I bought a few books and started to read. Some of them were huge and not being an avid text book reader it was slow going. I then looked into the websites available and started to build Sam's family tree. Within a year I had done five trees. It was only at this point did I think... what about my own family tree?

About 10 years ago, in a 'Big Reveal', my father had informed my brother and I that he was adopted but that was the end of the discussion and he didn't want to progress further with the matter. So I decided to start research my father's adoptive family tree. Half way through the process my father came to me and said that he wanted to discover his biological family tree. All of a sudden the nature of my work had taken a terrifying and vulnerable turn which was to take us all on an incredible journey.

I have loved every minute of becoming a Genealogist and I have so many requests from people to either do theirs or teach them how to do it themselves and work through various brick walls that they have hit in their research. The purpose of this blog is to help you create your own family tree without having to wade through 40 trees worth of books to do so. I will also highlight the hidden costs, pitfalls and ways in which to get your work published. I would love to hear from you so I can create a Q&A page. I am by no means a old genealogical wizard and everyday is a learning curve. The aim is to get you going, learning and achieving results.