Digging into the past

Sally Toms has started researching her family tree

In this issue we begin the first part of our guide to researching your family tree, a hobby that has experienced a huge rise in popularity in recent years.

Thanks to the internet and amount of information now available at the touch of a button, it's never been easier. And it's exciting because, unless you have an historian in your family, it probably hasn't been done before. For many of us, we are the first generation of family history researchers, delving in to uncharted territory from the comfort of home.

If you haven't yet started, I strongly recommend that you do.

I've already have. So when the opportunity arose to write something about World War II in Scotland, I took it in the hope that I would unearth some interesting stories regarding my own family.

I've always known that my grandfather, an engineer in the Royal Marines, was stationed for a time at Scapa Flow.

I wonder what it was like for him, and the thousands of other soldiers far from home, marooned on a cold, windswept island, isolated apart from being within easy reach of U-Boats and bombers from Nazi occupied Norway.

At the back of my mind I suppose I had hoped to unearth a picture of my old granddad during my research. Of course it would have been highly unlikely, but it was eerie, looking at images of empty buildings he might have walked through, or faces of people he might have known.

He once said that on guard duty in Orkney's persistent bad weather, the rain would literally run down his collar and s...

To read the rest of this article you can do any of the following.

• By : Sally Toms
• In : Editor's View
• Issue : 31
• Page : 3
• Words : 669