The title of this blog illustrates the wonderful variety that is family history, also known as, how many rabbit warrens can you plunge down head-first in a short space of time? Some lovely news first. I have had the huge honour of being made an honorary life member of the Society for One-Place Studies. I am always very unsure what I’ve done when these tributes come my way, except for having been around for a very long time but I am very grateful. I will continue to champion the cause of one-place studies, as there is so much that you can learn by focusing in on a small area and for family historians, it is important to understand the environment in which they lived.

I’ve also had great fun creating an interactive workshop about researching rural communities and their workers. This is due for its premier on 30 August and you can book for a whole day of fascinating presentations with an agricultural history theme here. I shall be persuading some friends to practice this workshop first but I think we are going to enjoy ourselves.

I’ve decided to take a step across to look again at a branch of my children’s ancestry, which is also the family for which I have an, admittedly pretty much dormant, one-name study. So a few days have been spent with the Sweetingham family who include generations of seafarers and shoemakers who settled in the Hamble estuary near Southampton. An area with an interesting history, ripe for a one-place study I’d say but emphatically not undertaken by me. Repeats to self ‘you do not need any more projects’. Once you untangle the Hughs who like to call themselves Luke and the Henrys who call themselves Hugh, because they can, you are on a roll with this lot, helped by several wills. Mind you, two family members were in court for destroying a will but the odd criminal adds to the story. Although I set up Granny’s Tales for my own ancestry, I am tempted to start uploading stories of ‘the other side’ because they too need preserving. The Sweetinghams are currently a series of notes so don’t hold your breath.

I’ve also been sent a book by a fellow genealogist from the US, Cheri Hudson Passey. This is on the important topic of tracing forward and finding living relatives; what Cheri calls ‘Genealogy in Reverse’. This has always been a key part of family history research; who knows what nuggets of information, memorabilia or photographs those distant cousins may have? With the advent of DNA testing, we have another reason to trace forwards to try to identify those DNA matches that come our way, or maybe to find people to persuade to test. Although we live in an era when there is a whole plethora of documentation about every individual, it is also a world of privacy laws, mobile populations and an awful lot of people. Tracking down distant living relatives, especially those who want to remain hidden, is an art. Although Cheri’s slim volume (54 pages), entitled Genealogy in Reverse: finding the living, is written for the US market, much of it is applicable across the English-speaking world and in any case, some of our living relatives may well be outside the UK. I don’t have a price but it is obtainable from the Genealogical Publishing Company in Baltimore, Maryland, if you are interested.

Another picture to remind you that I live somewhere beautiful.