About my genealogy

When autumn leaves fall they build layers beneath the tree,  eventually lower layers lose form and shape until only skeletons remain.  It's the natural process, it's organic, an analogy to human life. Like the leaves,  just a little evidence of the person remains – a Roman tile, a coin, a clay pipe from Shakespeare's time, a document, all left in place, waiting. Nothing we re-discover should be seen just as an object, everything we find belonged to a person who lived, and loved, and looked out at the sky each day.  We must remember that what we see and handle is a compression of their life and realise we've just opened one of the millions of windows into the ground.

I recently found a series of blog posts by Tonia Kendrick from 2011 discussing a 31 step programme which I'm following for development of a blog with the aim of increasing traffic several fold. The first link in the chain is the development of an 'elevator pitch' a short statement (recommended to be less than 150 words) that could be delivered to a stranger in the duration of an elevator ride to summarise the ethos behind the blog. My elevator pitch is the opening paragraph of this post and is loosely based on a passage from the final chapter of 'London' (Rutherfurd, 1998) which so appropriately sums up why I'm so passionate about this subject and explains why the concepts voiced struck such a powerful chord.

From the first, faltering steps, back in 1990's New Zealand regular trips to the local Family History Centre on Thursday evenings to consult a recently arrived reel of microfilm, ordered weeks earlier, that just might contain a reference to an ancestor who was the current focus of research. Saturday trips to the Library of New Zealand to consult immigrant ships manifests and voyage reports – all this added to the intense satisfaction of conducting a
forensic investigation into the infinite number of life changing events of people whose only connection is a common ancestry. I soon came to realise, that I was 'hooked', just as securely as any fish pursued by a skilful fly-fisherman.

In the 'Noughties' I established a web site using the ''thedobsons' domain but it became apparent that research into the 'Dobson' name represented only the very small tip of a very large iceberg – and now less than 1% of the individuals included in my tree have the last name Dobson. I was confronted by an enigma, people looking for Dobson references who consulted my online records would almost certainly be disappointed in the relative lack of relevant data to be found here and people interested in the name Switalla and its Polish origins would have no reason to consult a site whose name indicates that it is about a family with its roots firmly in England.

The solution I opted for was the establishment of the My Rellies web presence to hold my modest collection of records, plus some 'other stuff' I'm working on. By associating the names from the tree to this new site using various information linking resources like Cyndi's List, Genes Reunited and Ancestry and using a collaborative, open source genealogy tool webtrees, I am building on my research base and aim to provide resources to fellow researchers.

Rutherfurd, E. London. Arrow Books, pp.1298-1299