Family Trees can be just a list of people and how they are interrelated.

However they can contain so much more. Records, so many records.

Part of the process of assessment of a record for me, is about location. This takes me into social economic history. In the 19th century, where a lot of our records come from, life was considerably different form today. The very rich could move about the country, and indeed they would with a degree of ease that we have today, albeit on a different timescale. I recently found people on my tree that migrated to North America, and subsequently part of the family moved on to Australia, and set up home there. Shipping passenger records indicate that people from that family frequently visited their relatives both in North America and Britain, before returning to their home in Australia. That was not the lot of the masses though.

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