My Genealogy Progress Report - April 2015

Time seems to be speeding along at the moment. My baby is due in the next couple of weeks and we've been putting the finishing touches to his nursery and sorting some other areas of the house.

We've both also been getting on with our family trees. My wife has been loaned lots of items from her mum, which I've been scanning and organising record sheets for and I've been continuing my quest to delve deeper into the Havenith side of the family.

Around 5-6 years ago I was given a few sheets of paper that showed the Havenith side of the family going back into Belgium to around 1610 from a distant relative via my Opa. While some of the records I've found don't exactly match the details I was given, it's close enough to give me some confidence that I'm heading in the right direction.

Looking at records for Belgium, which also consists of German records due to the administration at the time of my ancestors lives, has been an interesting challenge. I enlisted the help of a genealogy group on Facebook, who I'll write about in a future post, and they've been very helpful. I'm starting to get to grips with FamilySearch better and have started to learn the arch.be website when looking for records. While this can be a slow process, it's wonderful to finally see the names you're looking for appear on a BMD record - something that makes the hours spent worthwhile.

As our first anniversary is coming up, we decided to follow tradition and get each other paper gifts. We both chose records of our ancestors! I'm really hoping that these records help us develop a stronger feeling of connectedness to each other and with our ancestors.

I'm looking forward to writing more about my journey into the past and starting to feel much more confident about the whole process.

When our baby is born there may well be a gap in posting, but I'll be back to posting as soon as possible.