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Hello Everyone,
Researching Embleton-Booth-Caswell-Holmes-O'Keefe- Kennedy-Whitfield.
I am a new member who has been active on here since the beginning of August 2022, so I apologize for not introducing myself sooner. I compiled an extensive family history in 1975 with copies produced by gestetner or mimeograph (the technology is now so old I am no longer certain which it was) from special paper put into a typewriter. Even now I am still grateful for contemporary word processing: I will never forget punching those dreadful keys on the old Underwood typewriter.
However, I did not keep that 1975 family history up to date. Life took over, but the very, very first thing that I did on the Internet around 1995 when I got Internet in my house was a genealogy search. When I got connected, I remember sitting for a minute or so in front of the computer thinking “What did I want to know?”, and to my surprise (twenty years after the fact) the answer to my question came really quickly: it was the maiden name of the wife of my third great grandfather. I could never have imagined that I would have an answer to my query in about thirty seconds. The marriage records for that year and place were being entered by a retiree in northeast England and came up immediately in the search results. I was yelling at my daughter to come upstairs from the rec room to see – “your great-great-great-great grandfather is on the Internet!!!”
Moving on to newer technology: while on a visit to England in 2019, I was astonished a second time when my daughter found on the Internet on her cell phone a probate notice for another family member who had been largely a blank space in 1975.
Then in the spring of 2022, I did a DNA test, the results of which – so European and not nearly so much UK - somewhat confounded me, so I joined Wikitree, which has brought me front and centre with some of the European ancestry from the DNA test.
