Software used

Before continuing with the Wright Horncastle story I thought it best to explain the software I use for my family history.

I use two programs for most of my family history, the first is Genopro (http://www.genopro.com/) which produces a special form of family tree called a genogram. Here is an example of my grandparents, parents and me.

Males are shown as squares, females as circles, a cross through the individual symbol means that he/she is dead and if the dates of birth and death are known the age at death is inside the symbol. If living the age according to the computer date is in the symbol. Males are to the left in a relationship and the oldest child is to the left regardless of sex.

The sheer graphical power of the program is great, the whole tree can be seen and zooming is via the mousewheel, clicking on the mousewheel allows dragging around the tree. All of an individual's details can be found by double clicking on the symbol as can details of a relationship. It is a very powerful program and can be tried for free or purchase it for $49.

The other program is Treepad which I use for all the data, notes, links to images and other files and my 'to do' notes. It has a tree structure which lends itself to family history, for example, I have a WrightHorncastle node for mine, a BangerGroves node for my wife's tree and so on. Each node has subnodes for each surname and another layer of subnodes for BMD data, census data, notes and so on. Hyperlinks may be inserted to other files such as census images, pdfs, photographs and so on. There is a freeware version but I use the much more capable Business Edition which costs $45 but you can try it for a limited period.

Obviously, a lot of other software is used such as Open Office, Opera browser, image processing and other miscellaneous tools but they are the normal programs which are used all the time.

I have just begun to use twin screens running off my laptop and these make an enormous time saving which I recommend.

Finding our grandparents

Our parents' marriage certificate gave us our paternal grandfather as Samuel Frederick WRIGHT and our maternal one as George HORNCASTLE.

FreeBMD gave a probable marriage of Samuel Frederick Wright in 4Q 1889 to either Emma Louisa Coker or Mary Ann Turvey but which? I searched for them in the 1901 census without success, it was only later that I found that granddad called himself Frederick on census returns. Then I remembered that Dad had said that his mother was buried in Chingford Mount Cemetery. I found an email address for the cemetery on Google and a very helpful lady found my grandfather's burial and in the same grave my grandmother, Mary Ann!

FreeBMD gave a possible marriage of George Horncastle in 2Q 1904 to either Sarah Hunt or Florence Lardant, again which one. This marriage was after 1901 so I did not think the census would be much use until I found George Horncastle living with his parents and Florence Lardant as the lodger!

So now we had our grandparents names, Samuel Frederick WRIGHT and Mary Ann TURVEY and George HORNCASTLE and Florence LARDANT.

The beginning

I started researching my family in January 2006, a first cousin, Jean Alice HORNCASTLE (1935-2005) had died in September and my sister thought that she might be the last of the Horncastles. Both of us had been considering our family history so we got together and I wrote down everything about the family we could remember. I remember our sense of shock when we realised that we did not know the names of our grandparents!

We pooled our documents and photographs which we had shared after our parents' deaths and I scanned them all and started investigating our family history.

Our timing was fortunate, Ancestry had just released the UK 1901 census and allowed its partial use for free for a month, FreeBMD was making good progress and we had our parents' maariage certificate which gave us the names of our grandfathers. I was computer literate, we already had broadband access and I had time.

Almost all my research has been done online but I have also met up with several of my distant relatives both via email and in the flesh. Much of my tree has been developed from contacts via GenesReunited which is well worth the £10/year membership. The exchange of information is vital to family history research but must be done with caution. Fortunately, I have only come across a few 'grabbers'.

My sister and I have also had fun visiting places associated with our family in England and on the Continent.