Liz introduced her talk by saying that although she had intended to illustrate it using her laptop it would not be possible as the laptop had been damaged by a glass of blackcurrant squash!
She intended to talk about ways of researching mysteries and myths that all of us have in our family trees, by researching “skeletons” it is possible to flesh them out and fill in gaps. As she is a professional genealogist she would only be using examples from her own or her husband’s family as she could not breach the confidentiality of her clients.
Liz explained that she had become interested in family history as her own surname “Ganniclifft” is particularly unusual. She talked about the reasons that people changed their names (other than through marriage) and about events that individuals might want concealed and she suggested that it would be worth investigating whether the concealment was deliberate.
Liz talked about her own complicated family and a tale of divorce that she was able to research. She included anecdotes about families from her home area of Huntingdonshire.
This was an entertaining and interesting talk with lots of ideas about sources of information that could be used to flesh out the skeletons on a family tree.
[Margaret Lake ]