I have been researching my family history for about 25 years, my parents couldn't help me much as they didn't know anything about their families, in those days children didn't ask questions and should be seen and not heard or so my father told me.
I plodded along after my father died and found that his father had more brothers than he knew about. I started putting notices up on every Genealogy site that I could find. Suddenly in 2000 I got an email from Canada, Lo & behold I had found a 3rd cousin from my Grandfathers younger brother whom we didn't know about. He had gone to Canada as a young man and married there.
My 3rd cousin's husband was tracing the family tree and he saw my notice in one of the Genealogy sites and contacted me. He told me that they were going to England the next week, so I quickly contacted my cousins and asked if they would like to make contact with the Canadian ones and could I give them the telephone numbers so they could make arrangements to meet. They agreed, so I quickly made contact with the information before they left Canada for England.
Contact was made and I think everyone concerned were quite happy that we had found one another, so contact by email quite often swapping information was very interesting.
In 2006 I decided to go to England for a holiday as it had been 50 years since my family had left England to reside in Australia and was the first time that I had been back to England. My Canadian cousins then said that they would come to England to meet me as I was the one that found them.
On the 29 May 2006 we planned to meet them in Bridlington at the hotel that I was staying at with a school friend who I hadn't seen in those 50 years and we had lost contact for a little while. My cousins arrived at the Hotel and I knew them as soon as I saw them as my 3rd cousin looked very much like my sister, I could see the resemblance to my side of the family. We had a great time and it was a lovely day and so we got lots & lots of photographs of all of the cousins together for the very first time. We still email one another just to keep up with the news on both sides.
I would like to thank all the genealogists for their time and effort of transcribing the Births, Deaths & Marriages and doing research. I myself have been transcribing for BMD for about 10 years and I am now transcribing for The Genealogist just to try and help others find their roots.
Margaret Hinchliffe
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