Family trees

A few days before heading to Scotland, I took a trip back in time by visiting my maternal grandfather’s birthplace in Normandy and trying to retrace his family tree. Next to the local church, I spotted my great-grandfather’s name on the World War I memorial (with a spelling mistake), as well as the former house of my great-great-grand-father… Using the records available from the tiny city hall, I then found that my great³-grand-father had moved around 1850-1870 from another small village. This stopped my search right away, but coming home I checked on the Internet and found that all records for this village were available on the Web, thanks to a genealogy buff who had transcribed them. I thus went back six generations on the paternal side, up to Simon EUDE(S), born in 1633, who died in 1715… Very exciting! Given that I did go about the same past on my father’s side with François Robert, who was born about 1605 (under Henry the IVth!) and died in 1685, I thus reconstituted (mostly through digitised records) some of my direct ancestry on both paternal and maternal sides up to ten generations. The most interesting part when digging through these ancestral documents are the little pieces of information provided on the side, like the job (“occupation”), mostly labourer, with the occasional farmer and potter, as well as the lifespans of those people (fairly long, rather surprisingly!) and the very small number of relocations in a small geographic area over the centuries…