Week 33 – Service For this week’s blog I make no apologies for moving away from my own family to another centre of research which has...

Week 32 – Library. William Samuel Gregory was born in Wolverhampton on 26 January 1873, the fifth of nine children (and only son) born to...

Week 30 – Team. George Edward Cordell, son of Thomas Cordell and Ann Purdom, was born in Shoreditch on 26 September 1854. His father was...

Week 29 – Fun facts. Short and sweet this week! My 8x grandmother was called Grizagon (or Crissagon). My ancestral surnames include...

Week 28 – Character. Although my immediate family stuck mainly to traditional names for their children, some more distant branches chose...

Week 27 – Extended family Our ancestors didn’t exist in isolation – they had brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth...

Week 26 – Identity. The longest-standing mystery in my family history is the identity of my paternal great-grandfather, which remains...

Week 25 – Broken branch. In my first blog for the 52 Ancestors challenge I explained that I was given an enormous head start on Mum’s...

Week 24 – Popular name. I imagine that like me, most family historians have found themselves at some point sighing at the lack of...

Week 23 - Mistake. Some bad moves – and some good ones – during World War II. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, my maternal...

Week 22 - Conflict or "Uncle Edwyn with the poker in the parlour" It’s easy to view the past – and by extension our ancestors – through...

Like it or loathe it, royal anniversaries – like royal births – have had a noticeable influence on the naming of British children. It’s a...

Week 21 – Yearbook. Yearbooks are an American tradition, rather than a British one, so I decided to interpret this week’s prompt in my...

Week 20 – Textile. With this week’s prompt, I’m honestly spoilt for choice! Even setting aside the various seamstresses in the family,...

Week 19 – Food and drink This week’s prompt made me think of a family with several members connected directly or indirectly to the food...

While all names have a meaning, in the past some were apparently given to children in order to encourage them towards a better way of...

Week 18 – Social. Rather than looking at one ancestor in particular, I’m going to illustrate this week’s theme through three photographs,...

Week 17 – Document. Following this week’s prompt, I decided to look at my maternal grandfather and some of the documents (physical and...

We tend to think that the quest for unusual and original baby names is a recent phenomenon, but history proves otherwise! Certain modern...

For this week’s topic, I decided to look at how negative results can actually be positives in genealogy research. A famous detective...