Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

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Genealogy Guy 0:17
Welcome along to another episode of Armchair Genealogy with me, Mell, the genealogy guy who like you, is on the journey of family tree research. Joining us today is Dave Annal, senior researcher at Lifelines Research. Dave is a popular lecturer, and he's well known on the family history circuit. And in 2019 he was awarded the fellowship of the Society of Genealogists, and in 2022 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He regularly gives talks on a wide range of family history topics, and is also a respected and successful authorand written a number of family history books, and is a regular contributor to family tree magazine. So welcome along to Armchair Genealogy, Dave.

Dave Annal 1:01
Thank you very much. Mell, thanks. It's good to be here

Genealogy Guy 1:03
And to start us off with as I do with most people. What's your journey? How did you get into genealogy?

Dave Annal 1:09
I was always interested in history, right from a very young age, and I remember even a primary school doing a project on the Great Plague. So, you know, it's always, it's always been in my blood, I think. And I'm a visual learner as well, and I was always drawn to maps and and family trees and charts in books, which, of course, in those books, when you're reading as a child, they're always the family trees you would look at would be royal family trees. So I became a little bit obsessed for a while with European royal families and trying to see how they all joined up and everything like that. So I think that was, that was part of the sort of early years of it. And then the particular thing I can remember that when I became actively interested in my own family tree was, and this must have been about 1978 or 79 or something like that. I remember my Uncle Tom was coming to stay, and I remember asking my mum, who is he? I mean, Iknew who he was, because he was someone we always used to go and see when we went up to Edinburgh and we would meet up. And Iknew he's a relative, but I knew he wasn't my mum's brother and he wasn't my dad's brother. So, you know, how was he? My uncle, and my mum sat down with me and we together, we drew up a little family tree so she could show me how he was related. I've still got that family tree somewhere, you know, how old is that getting on for, sort of 45/46 years ago, or something like that. But it turned out that he was my granny's first cousin. It was a big Edinburgh Scottish family, so he's my first cousin, twice removed. And I think that was it. That was really what got me, what got me going in it probably around the same time the there was that BBC program, the discovering your family history with Gordon Honeycomb. And I watched that, and I absolutely loved that really inspired me. And I think it opened my eyes up to the idea that ordinary people like me had families as well. It wasn't just royal families who could drop their family trees. It was, it was ordinary people like me. And I bought the book, the Don Steele book (Discovering Your Family History), which I've got, I've still got as well, and I just devoured it. It was definitely life changing. Watching that program

Genealogy Guy 3:08
That was one of the things that inspired me. I watched that, and I was just fascinated with how we tracked down, and then at the end, they had the big reunion in the village where they think it all started

Dave Annal 3:16
That's right, remember that? Yeah, yeah. That was great

Genealogy Guy 3:20
With so many people relying on commercial genealogy websites and user submitted trees, did you think traditional evidence based research is being sidelined? And what do you think are the risks of that shift?

Dave Annal 3:33
It is something I do get quite, quite hot under the collar about, really, but I mean, for a start, I mean, let's say I'm not a Luddite. I don't wantto go back. I'm, I'm fully aware of the enormous benefits of of, you know, online access, 24 hours a day, 365, days a year, all that sort of stuff. It's, it's fantastic. And not, not just the UK resources, but to stuff from all around the world. It's, it's absolutely brilliant. As a professional researcher, I couldn't begin to do my job without that sort of access. It's absolutely vital. But what I feel is that, when I started out with this now, everything you wanted to look at, you had to well, my dear late friend Audrey Collins had this great phrase usedto say you had to go to a place to look at a thing, which I think is absolutely right, you you couldn't just, you know, switch on a computer. Computers, what were they anyway? But, you know, you had to actually put your coat on, go to a record office or a library and and look at a physical document of some sort. And perhaps, increasingly, there was stuff available on microfilm and microfiche, but generally speaking, you were looking at real things. And I fear that one of the problems with digitisation is that we've lost that contact, that sort of context of what a document is. You do a search, you type in the details, you hit Return, and there it is up on your screen. Well, hopefully there it is. There's that the page has got your ancestors details on it. But, yeah, but what is it you're looking at? You know what you've they've removed all sort of context. You just bang. You drop down on it. There. You plunk down on this page. In the old days when we when we went through microfilms, or we look at actual book, you understand the structure of it. You know what it is you're looking at. You can feel whether it's a register, a page in a register, or whether it's a single document and you've got that physical contact with it that gives you the context. I just I just fear that's that's the first point I would want to make. I fear that we're losing that a little bit just by being given into information without a whole amount of context.

Genealogy Guy 5:40
How do you think that's going to change the way that a next generation? Do you think they're going to lose that, that, as you say, context, that that this was in a book, this was from a census, this wasfrom a will, or whatever it is.

Dave Annal 5:53
Yeah, I think they do. I think that has been taken away. And there's the whole thing of just, is it a register, or is it a document? But is it? Is that register part of a larger collection? What is that larger collection? Why was the document created? Was it the result of a specific piece of legislation? What would the legislation tell you about it? What all those abbreviations that you're seeing mean, and what about those little check marks? But there's that, all that background to the material that the online genealogical websites, they they're there to make money, that's what they're doing, and thatthey do a very good job of it. But are they actually teaching people to become good researchers? And I would argue that they're not. You know, is that document? Is it a snapshot? Is it something that happened on a particular day, or is it a working document that was being amended all the time by people, and if so, who was updating it? What instructions did they have? And where's the original document held today? You know, where is it? How did it end up in that record office or that library? There's all those things that they tryto make it sound very easy. You just type in your name and out comes your family tree. You know, it's not like that, is it? And we wouldn't want it to be like that. You know, we really don't want that to be what it's like. We want. Well, I, I like the journey. That's, I think that's a big part of the research. Is the journey. If you want to just find out who your ancestors are and read about it on in a on a computer, in a book, that's fine, you do that. But for me, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is, is getting there? Is this, the discovery, the detective work in it? I think

Genealogy Guy 7:29
I would agree with you totally, because, like I in my head, I can see a future where, because of AI, you'll be able to install this on your on your own machine, type in that you want the family tree. It will look online, find some ancestry tree, download it all, analyze it, and then tell you your tree. And you're going, it's not the same. You haven't putthe passion into you haven't dug deeper to find out the story behind these people. So the next generation, or sort of five generations, aren't they're going to find it so, so easy. It's like, oh, family trees, nothing. It's just..

Speaker 1 7:59
Well yeah yes, they I think they are going to find it easy in a way, butthen what they get is, is it actually going to be accurate? I just, I feel that AI has no place whatsoever in original historical research, whatever type of research it's it's got nothing to add. It is wholly unable to carry out that sophisticated, evidence based research that we need to employ when we're trying to crack a really tricky problem. Because what it's going to do is it's going to look at the information that's already out there. And by out there, I mean on the internet, not on the shelves of the archives, not that book that hasn't been digitized, that bundle of papers that's just sitting there, tied up in a in, you know, lovely pink ribbon in a nice in a nice bag there is not looking at those, because it doesn't know about those. It can't know about those. So I just think that the most of the answers to our trickiest problems are probably in these archives, in undiscovered documents, and they're going to be discovered through human intelligence, not through artificial intelligence. Been very worried about this, because I feel like I'm going to sound like a Luddite. I'm going to feel like someone who wants to smash all the machines andgo back to using quills and pens and ink, and I really don't, I just thinkthat there's so much about AI that is wrong, and that it's just just thatall that the the hints and suggestions that ancestry throw up, they are all dependent on the idea that the person that you're looking for, let's say you're looking for someone called John Smith, and that that person whose origins you're trying to find was necessarily born as John Smith if he wasn't born as John Smith, which is almost certainly the problem and the reason that you can't find him because there's any number of reasons why someone's going to have a different name later in life than the name that they were born with. AI is not going to help with that. Hints and suggestions aren't going to help with that. It. It absolutely needs that human input to do the difficult thinking, to say, Well, hold on a second. Okay, I'll give you a case. Working on this case just last week, for someone who was looking fortheir grandfather. So someone very you know, they knew quite well. They also knew he's a little bit shady about his origins, so when they tried to find his birth certificate. They couldn't find one. They'd never found a record of his birth, but we had some pretty good informationabout his later life. We knew where he was born, we knew how old hewas, we knew who he claimed his father was, and nothing was adding up. There was absolutely nothing that said this is this is the right person. There was no one of that name in the right area. There was no families in the contemporary census returns, he just seemed to appear on Earth as a fully formed adult aged about 23 or something like which, clearly, people don't do. And it was eventually, I mean, I tried a number of things. Eventually, what I worked out, I found he was, he was married in 1914 I think it was. And the address from which he was married. I looked in the 1911 census, and there wasa person with the same first names, the same combination of two first names, the right age, born in the right place, with a father of the same first name that he gave when he got married. Completely different surname is actually a French surname, and it was an Englishsurname that he'd that he'd adopted, and perhaps he'd taken change the name during the First World War and decided to make him sound a little bit more English than he actually was. But I challenge AI to crack that

Genealogy Guy 11:33
I would agree with you totally. I mean, over time, it will get better,

Dave Annal 11:37
But I think it's still, it's still absolutely dependent on what other people have already found.

Genealogy Guy 11:44
And the transcription that you've pointed out. If the transcription is slightly out, and you you spot that, if you don't question it in your brain going, that's not quite right. Ai, yeah. Now there's the data I've got. I've got the date for you, and there's the name of the person got.Tick the box done, yeah, well not quite.

Dave Annal 12:00
With it, with the hints and suggestions that ancestry throws at you allthe time. It's so easy to say, Click, that's it. That's my family. I've got them, and then you've added them to your family. I call it the click and collect generation. So you do that, you just click it, you add it to your family tree, and there it is. But worse than that, that's fine if you want that on your family tree. If you don't care, not bother. It doesn't bother me at all. The problem with it is that that then reinforces that this is the right family because, oh, look, there's another piece of evidence saying that these this is the right line of descent. And the more people click and collect, the more people add information. I'll tell you another, another little one. This is something I discovered a few years ago, I was researching. I was actually researching a different family, but I came across this, and he was a very early settler in New England, about 1630s he he'd apparently arrived in New England. As you with a lot of these, these early settlers, there's a huge amount of research being done in America, because everyone wants to find their, you know, pilgrim father ancestor, or their early settler in Virginia, or something like that. So, so this guy, I'd looked online, and I just came across this other person, because he was someone who might have been connected to the person I was looking for. I looked online for him. There were 20,000 family trees on there, 20,000 ancestry family trees, all of them giving this place o birth, date of birth, in Stepney, in 1603, so okay, go back to the actualrecord. Have a look at it. There it is. John Jackson. His name was John Jackson, son of Christopher Jackson of Mile End baptised January 16, 02/03, brilliant, fantastic. The only problem is, six days later, that child was buried. So those 20,000 people are all wrong. They have all got the wrong ancestor. That person is not their ancestor. Two more things to say about that. I then I was able actually to track it down, because it's not just an internet thing. This is, this is something that people have always done. I tracked it back to a reference in a book published in things about 1868 where someone had found this record of a baptism, and thought, right, that's my ancestor. That's my John Jackson. And that had then become established truth, and people repeated it in 1881 there's another book published that says the same thing. 1912 another one. I kept finding these books that kept on repeating this, and then it goesonto the internet, and it becomes exponential. Two years ago, there were 20,000 records I looked this morning. There are now 41,000 people who've got this.

Genealogy Guy 14:37
Whoa. That's a lot of mistakes.

Dave Annal 14:40
It's a lot of mistakes, but it's one mistake, isn't it? It's actually that one mistake by the guy back in 1868

Genealogy Guy 14:46
As you say, that the problem is that people just click on and go, Oh, that's the that's the right one, and they add it and they go, Oh, they've got a tree as well. I'll just, I'll just add their tree. As you say, they haven't checked it. They're assuming the other person has got. Itright, and

Dave Annal 15:01
If they're even assuming that they might just, you know, they might just not care. And I say, as I say, I'm very happy for people to do theirown family history however they want to do it until it starts impacting on what serious researchers want to do.

Genealogy Guy 15:17
Yes it causes, the big complications. And for that reason, a lot of people, I'm always telling people just, just if you're going to play around with things, make it private so that you can do what you want. Don't share it until you know you've got it absolutely crystal clear. That's right. As soon as you share it, everyone else goes, Oh, you've done that. Oh, you found that person for me, fantastic. Thank you very much. It's like, well, I don't know that. I'm presumed.

Dave Annal 15:43
That's right. It's a theory, yeah. And that's the way that research works, isn't it? You come up with a theory, you try to disprove it. You try to think, Well, can I find that this isn't the case? I've got this person's birth. I think that might be him. So the first thing you do, andthis is what these 40,000 people haven't done, the first thing you do is, if you found a baptism of someone, you check if there's an infant burial. It's not hard to do. It's really not hard to do. You just have a quick look. Did that person die in the next year or so? Ah, they did, right? Well, then that's not my ancestor, is it? Or you might just find you've got, you've got two or three candidates. I use this, this image of chickens and eggs. So the person we're looking for is a chicken. We've got this ancestor, and they're an adult, and we've got a lot of information about them. What we're trying to do is to find the egg that they hatched from, and that's probably going to be in the shapeof a record of a birth or baptism, but it might not be that. It might be some other record, like a Will that mentions them, or poor law recordor a census return later, it might be some something that tells you this is the parent of that of that chicken. So you look at each of the eggs in the basket, and one at a time, you try to rule them out. You say, Well, that one can't be because that one was buried. That one died very young, so get rid of that egg. Here's another egg? Well, okay, that can't be our one, because I know what happened to that egg. He became this chicken over here. And look, they're different chickens, so they must have come from different eggs. So that can't be our one, either. And you keep going like that until you've exhausted all the eggs in your basket. Hopefully you've only got one. And then you build your theory on that. You think, Well, that's that, I think is probably the egg that I'm looking for.

Speaker 2 17:22
Armchair genealogy.com for generations of all ages.

Genealogy Guy 17:27
Let's just grab a breather from chatting with Dave Annall, and it gives me a chance to give you some tips of my own starting out on a family tree. Well, here's a few more tips and food for thought. Here are some of the top 10 sort of classic beginner mistakes and how to dodge them. One, skipping the groundwork. Always start with what you actually know and build from there. Two, relying on the internet. Helpful. Yeah, infallible. No, mix it up with real world sources like letters, photos, family Bibles, if you're lucky to find them. Number three, forgetting to record where you found things. Sources do matter in research without them, facts can unravel very fast. Four, not asking older relatives, their memories, priceless. Ask now or risk losing them forever. Five, ignoring spelling variations. Names change over time. Don't let that trip you up. Six, trusting family myths without checking the facts, lovely stories, but do double check them. Seven, overlooking the siblings, cousins and in laws, they open doors you didn't expect, and they may know things that no one else does. Eight, keeping everything to yourself, share what you're finding, collaborate with family members. It can bring great surprises. Nine, setting it and forgetting it, your tree should grow with you. It doesn't just stop. And finally, 10, getting frustrated. Genealogy is a slow burn. Enjoy the journey. It's not about the destination, and remember, it's always about the stories of people's lives. And let's now return back to Dave Annal, who's telling us more about how important it is to think about your research and how you go about it.

Genealogy Guy 19:32
For anyone interesting they're going, I've always wanted to do this, because I ask this of everybody is, what would you suggest is a they starter as. If you're going to start here, you need to start at this point to sort of get the ball rolling without just jumping in too far.

Dave Annal 19:46
too far. I mean, obviously the temptation is to go straight online and start doing it, but I think the first thing is actually to talk to people, totalk to your relatives, your auntie Maud in Tunbridge Wells, you knowshe she's probably got a box of stuff in her attic somewhere that's got some amazing documents in there, and those documents are great because, unlike the stuff that we're looking at online, we know that those documents relate to our family, because they've got inbuilt provenance. You know that they're the right things because, because she's collected them, or her mum and dad have collected it, or her uncle and aunt and so on. So I would start with that. I would start speaking, speaking to people, getting stories together, finding out about Uncle Alf who served in the First World War, or Auntie Helen who went off to Australia in the 1930s all that sort of thing. And and speak to people. And then then go online and try to contactsome of these people as well. And then you might find that there are shared ancestors out there. But if you just launch straight in and say, right, I'm going to find my family now, well, you might be done in halfan hour, but you might have the wrong family. So

Genealogy Guy 20:50
Absolutely,

Dave Annal 20:50
But read up on the record, on the documents, get to know the records. That's such an important thing. Understand what it is you're looking at, because the genealogical website are not doing that for you. They're not helping you out with that because they want to pushyou down the hints and suggestions, the AI route. That's the way they want to go, because education, actually creating good researchers is a much more difficult thing to do than just to feed them hints and suggestions

Genealogy Guy 21:22
Taking the points that you started as a good starting point. So how do you go about tackling brick walls in research, especially when youfind those records are missing or conflicting? How do you go right? How can I kind of break this wall down?

Dave Annal 21:37
I use this process. It's quite well established, called Family reconstruction, or family reconstitution. I'm actually working on a case this morning. I've been doing this where you basically, you've got your target person, your egg in your basket, as it were, and what you want to do is to find out everything you can about the family of that egg, whether it's your family or not. You want to find out everything you can. So you want to find out who are the parents. What about what happened to them? What about siblings? How many brothers and sisters do they have? You go through the parish registers and for that area, and you extract every single reference to that surname. And then you start putting them together in speculative, theoretical family groups. You start sorting them out. Say, Well, there's a little bunch that's a family there. That's where their parents got married. I've got that information. I can put them there and look for burial records. Hopefully, if you, if you're lucky, they're the sort of people who left wills, and that's really going to help you, because wills are a fantastic resource. You might find that if you want to dig even further into it, you might find manorial court records, deeds and so on that really chancery cases. I mean, that's not for beginners. I'm not going to say if you're a beginner, right, go and have a look, see if your ancestor was involved in the chancellor case, a little bit specialist, and can take a little bit more time to unravel it all. But, by a process of that, you I do this, I do a talk calledwalls come tumbling down, where I go through this. It's a five step process that we start with looking at the person we're interested in, finding out everything we know about them from later records, using that to find to identify potential birth records for them. Then with each of those trying to do what it was saying before about eliminating the ones that can't possibly be him, and then when you'releft with with your one or two candidates, then family reconstruction comes in. And guess what? It takes a lot of time. It's hard. It's not easy. You know, it really isn't easy, but if you want to do it properly, ifyou want to find the right people, you want to end up with people who genuinely are your ancestors, rather than someone who just happens to have the same name as one of your ancestors, then that's the way to do it just, just hard work. What I've done this morning, I've been extracting information about this family from one parish, little parish in Leicestershire, and there's about 80 baptisms and about 60 burials from the same period, about 300 year period. And that's taken me about I spent about three hours on it this morning, and I'm probably about halfway through that part of the process. So it's not quick. It's not just, let's just, you know, just you know, just see what we can find out about the family this afternoon. It's part of a long process.

Genealogy Guy 24:25
What resources or archives Do you personally find most valuable when, when tracing British and Irish ancestry?

Dave Annal 24:32
Well, undoubtedly, the very organisations, very websites that I've just been attacking are definitely the place to start. I mean, you know, ancestry, find my past, they have fundamentally changed the way that you can do your research, because you can do this online. You can access things. They're indexed. They've indexed the records. And okay, the quality of the indexing may not be great, but it's a start. It'sa good a good place to start. In most cases, you can browse through the record. So you can do what we used to do in the old days. You can digitally turn the pages and wind your way through a film. And so I definitely, I mean, I use, I'd use ancestry and find my past every single day of my work, of my life, not, you know, no question at all. I'm always using them in terms of archives, it depends on where your research takes you. You might have to go to the National Archives in Kew, you might want to, need to go to one of the county record offices, or you might go to a local studies library where they've got very, very locally based records like, you know, tax, taxation records, electoral rolls, newspapers, that sort of thing. It all depends on, on where your journey leads you. But if you're not getting out of your house and doing some research in an archive, you're probably not doing your job properly.

Genealogy Guy 25:52
The idea of different platforms, but I often get asked them, well, which is, which is the best one? You have to explain to them. They've all got their strengths and weaknesses, and they've all got different databases

Dave Annal 26:03
Exactly, yeah, as a professional researcher, I I have to be subscribed to them all, but I'd also understand that if you're a hobbyist and you're on limited budget, then you're going to have to pick and choose. I genuinely think that probably, if I just had one, I would probably just have ancestry. And I know I spend, I spend half my my life online, certainly on blue sky, attacking ancestry for various atrocities that they commit. But as a means of accessing information, it's unrivaled. It really is. I mean, find my past very, very good and for, for just British, for UK records, find my past, possibly just about wins, but I think for the whole world thing, ancestry has just got such an amazing collection of records. I should also mention Family Search and has the benefit of being free, of course, which is isa wonderful thing. I'm so used to just jumping from one to the other. My mind isn't really geared up to that. Thinking, which one am I actually using most? I think I'd probably spend more time on Ancestry than anywhere else.

Dave Annal 26:03
Then the latest one that I've just been saying to people is, like the newspapers, a lot of the digitisation of newspapers now, which have got fantastic nuggets of bits of information. But don't start there, because

Dave Annal 27:22
No newspapers are of just fantastic source for those little stories that you never thought you wanted to know and you would never have found out otherwise. And okay, sometimes your great granny might not want you to have discovered what you've just discovered about her, and that newspaper report where she was found drunk and brawling in the street or something like that. But it does just bring these people alive, doesn't it that they are real people. They're not just names and dates on a family tree. They are real people who, youknow, who suffered crises in life, who had great moments. You know, perhaps someone won a golf tournament or something like that, or they won a prize at their school, or wonderful things. It's not all the negative things, but, yeah, I absolutely love newspapers. They just, they didn't make a difference. And they, they do help us to do what I think that, as family historians, we should be doing more and more, which is telling our ancestors stories, not just collecting names and dates.

Genealogy Guy 28:21
I think that's the big thing that I've noticed online. There's lots more people coming through and talking about the story of their family and saying, This is important, and you should all be doing this, not just doing the family tree.

Dave Annal 28:33
That's, that's something that's definitely changed for the better in thelast 20 or 30, years. When I again, when I started out, you look at all the family history textbooks that were around then. It was very muchabout building your pedigree. This is the way we do this. And, you know, laying out your pedigree. And you think that's that's not people, those are just names that doesn't mean anything. Doesn't speak to me, really. So, yeah, stories, that is something that really has changed for the better. And I think there's a lot of work being done by as a wonderful author called Hallie Rubenhold, who wrote a book about the victims of the of the Jack the Ripper, and she used what you call traditional family family history resources to reconstruct the lives of these poor women. Absolutely fantastic piece of work. And that's that really inspired me and made me think, this is,this is something I can do as well. That same, that same microscopicattention to detail, you just you find every single little piece you can find out about someone. I was doing this for my, my wife's, my wife's family recently, and her, I think it's a two time, one of her two times great grandfathers, and we just knew him as a name. He was called James Dobson Graveson, and he lived up in the Lake District, and wewere interested in him because it was a nice, exotic place to live and we could go and see and we found his gravestone a few years ago. He died quite young, and we knew that he was a solicitors clerk. We thought, okay, that's quite interesting. You know, most. To their ancestors were laborers or farmers occasionally. But this was quite an interesting one. And it was only when I started going to the newspapers, I was preparing a talk for about how to use newspapers,and I thought he'd make a good case study, that I found these incredible things about him as a performer in amateur dramatics andas a vocalist. And you know, he's every year in the newspaper, local newspaper, there's four or five reports of him taking part in some event. And you know, he starts off, you just see him occasionally rightat the bottom of the what do you call it program? That's it the bottom of the program. But then he gradually moves up the program, and he's sort of headlining, and his James Dobson Graveson, is singing tonight at such and such, wow, brilliant, you know. And I would never have known that about him if it wasn't for the newspaper, because there's nothing in the official records that says solicitors, Clark brackets, he liked to go and sing at the weekend or something, you know.

Genealogy Guy 30:54
So tell me, Dave, if people want to find out more about what you do, and particularly want to listen to some of your rants, where can they find you and and what you do? And you know, life lifelines research, generally,

Speaker 1 31:09
my website probably be the best place to start. Just WWW.Llifelinesresearch.co.uk. There's a link there to my YouTube, YouTube channel,which is called setting the record straight. And I think I've got about 30 odd videos on there. I haven't done one for ages, and I feel like I'ma Catholic Church in confessional here. I'm sorry I haven't done this for six months or something, but I do have plans to do more, but you'll find my blog on my website as well. Yeah, there are quite a fewrants on there as well, but positive at times as well. It's not, it's not all just, you know, standing up and throwing mud at people. There's, there's lots of positive things out there as well.

Genealogy Guy 31:48
I can recommend the YouTube clips because there's, there's some real nuggets of bits of information and different ways of thinking about how to approach things. So I can recommend people go and watch you, because I enjoyed listening to those and watching and, asI say, the alternative viewpoint. And sometimes you have to turn something on its head to something, yeah, oh yeah. That's, that's a different way of doing it. So tell me, Dave, have you ever found out something quite surprising when you've been doing your research?

Dave Annal 32:15
Yeah, I suppose that there was something I did several years ago for a client who was trying to find out about this very, very interesting character, who actually left a diary of his experiences in the gold rush in Canada. It was a very interesting story. And, you know, he went out into Canada and Klondike and everything like that. And it was, it was a lot of amazing things happened to him, and it was quiteaccepted by people who this person was. And when I started looking into him, I realised that they were all wrong, and he wasn't this person. He was actually a cousin of the person that they'd been looking at. And there's actually, there's a program, BBC Two program, been made about this person, but it's the wrong person. Wow, they actually just got wrong. He's two same, two first names, but swapped around the other way. And he's not, he's, yeah, he's not the person they thought he was. They thought he was this military officer, but in fact, he was his much poorer cousin who had a very, very interesting life. I'd love, I'd love to find out a bit more about him. As the thing with client work, you have to stop sometimes, you know, you have to say, That's it. That's it. That's about as much as I can findout. Now. That's what the client wants. And sometimes you want to keep digging.

Genealogy Guy 33:27
And does the program that they're making do? They do. They know that it's it's wrong.

Dave Annal 33:33
They might if they listen to this podcast.

Genealogy Guy 33:37
Well there you go, an exclusive if someone's listening and can pass on to the right production company. Well, thank you very much, Dave. Dave Annal, it's been, it's been an absolute pleasure having a chat with you and sharing some anecdotal stories and and just sharing some views. And I think it's just so important that genealogists don't sit in their ivory towers and just go, this is what wedo. It's all secretive because it's all about just sharing family stories. So thank you very much Dave.

Dave Annal 34:04
Thank you Mell. Thanks for listening to me. Thanks for inviting me along. It's great.

Genealogy Guy 34:07
And our thanks there to Dave Annal and, uh, do remember if you want to check out his social platforms or maybe even his website, so you can always look him up on lifelines research.co.uk, until the next episode, happy and productive research

Speaker 2 34:25
and remember to subscribe to the podcast to be informed when new editions are published.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai