About fifteen years ago I became interested in genealogy and family histories. At the time I knew very little about my own family, partly due to their propensity for multiple marriages and family feuds. It didn’t help that my parents were from two different ends of Europe, either. I started my research by going through old family photographs and interrogating my grandmother. After exhausting her knowledge, I realized that as a penniless student I did not yet have the resources to tackle my own family fully, as my ancestors are spread across at least three countries (Ukraine, Russia, and Finland) which presented a number of jurisdictional and linguistic obstacles.
Just as I was despairing that I would never be able to fully trace my own family, I met my boyfriend (and now husband) Mike – who knew that he had relatives, but did not yet realize just how many of them there were. Fortunately, he is extremely English by background (even though he is Canadian by birth), and the resources available to track the English are rather more thorough and readily accessible than those in Ukraine. After discovering the joys of Ancestry.com, many manic research sessions ensued and before long I was corresponding with many of Mike’s distant relatives. This hobby has led to several genealogical pilgrimages to the village where much of his paternal grandfather’s family is from in Hertfordshire, as well as many afternoons running around graveyards all over the East Midlands.
Over the past few years I’ve had plenty of practice doing genealogical research – mostly on Mike’s family tree (which one day will probably include all of England), and also on the Finnish side of my own tree through the help of newly discovered cousins. I have also started assisting friends, mostly from the United States, with getting started on family research of their own.