Merry Christmas everyone and I hope you are all having a happy day no matter what you’re up to. Today I will be having my Mum and Sister around and I’ll be doing the cooking for them as it’s my first Christmas in the new house.

I’m currently peeling away and need to get the beef joint in the oven soon, then comes the perfect timing of when to cook all the bits and bobs and remembering not to forget anything.

Getting things ready for the roast

It’s actually very peaceful at the moment and it’s nice to think that for at least one day a year all (most) of the shops shut, the pubs shut (apart from some open at lunch), and families get together with very little other distractions apart from what to watch on TV in the afternoon.

I’d better get back to work now, so have a great day. x

I seem to think that I don’t really have a large family and I suppose part of this is that the only person I see regularly is my mother, who lives in Ramsgate too. My father lives between London and Turkey, and my father’s side of the family live aboard.

This goes back to my mum, who is an only child, so no aunts or uncles or cousins, and then both my grandparents are dead, and then you are way back into the family tree. I assumed that really meant that I don’t really have that much family on my mother’s side, but on Saturday I was proved wrong and got to meet a lot of family I didn’t even really know about.

Yesterday my mum, sister, and myself were invited to a Golden wedding anniversary (50 years of marriage) and before we got there I didn’t really understand where we all fitted in and to be honest was a little confused but after a brilliant day I can now say that I have a lot more family than I thought I did. OK, it does come down to first cousins twice removed, second cousins once removed, and third cousins, but at the end of the day my great grandfather’s sister had a big family, and they are also my family too.

My grandmother and her parents.

I now feel it’s not just about nuclear families, but goes a lot further than that and we are related by blood which surely means something. My mum has been working on her family tree for quite a while now, but there is also a lot of knowledge to be got from the extended family, and sadly the fact is that if this information isn’t passed down, then it will be lost. There are many things I would love to have asked my grandparents but never got around to, and seeing photos of them has brought it back.

I am investigating the idea of setting up a genealogy website for the family so that they can add information, photos, annecdotes etc and I’ve now started scanning in any old photos my mum has as  it would be all too easy for these to get damaged and then they would be lost forever. I need to do this for recent photos too but we’ll start way back and work forward. For the website I’ve investigated a variety of opensource programmes but they haven’t really been what I’ve wanted and the closest I’ve found is TNG 7 which is $30 but seems to be updated regularly and has a wide array of features.

If this all works out it’ll be very interesting indeed.