About Forefathers - the professional genealogy research service
Forefathers is a family history and genealogy research service based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.
Whatever your needs, whether you have a major genealogical project in mind or just need a little help with your own family tree, we're happy to assist.
We also have extensive experience helping those whose ancestors came from the British Isles but moved overseas. For example, we have in-depth knowledge of how to trace the origins in these islands of those who later moved to Australia, whether voluntarily or as transported convicts. We also have considerable experience helping clients from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA.
Forefathers is registered in England and Wales as company number 7929212. Although we operate as a limited company, but are not VAT-registered.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite. I worked in IT for 30 years and have developed my fair share of software in that time. I strongly believe that technology has a made a major contribution to the boom that family history is currently enjoying. I also believe software can make the life of every genealogist easier and more productive. It's just that I don't think it goes far enough at present - unless, that is, I'm missing something and there are programs and features out there I'm not aware of - in which case, please enlighten me, because I need them.
So what's wrong with that, I hear you ask? Well, nothing, so far as recording "facts" goes. But the trouble is, so often in genealogy, we're not actually dealing in "facts"; not, at least, in the sense of clear-cut, hard-and-fast indisputable truths about people's lives. In reality, much of what we do as genealogists is actually about hypothesis, conjecture and interpretation. It's about taking snippets of information from various sources and piecing them together as best we can to form a coherent view that hopefully approximates to the reality of history. Some of the sources at our disposal will be highly reliable and in agreement one another, but often sources will be incomplete or questionable and the details we obtain from one source may conflict with those we glean from another. But ideally, we still need to record it all somewhere, and it would be good to be able to do that electronically in some convenient, accessible and usable form (i.e. not just in Notepad or Excel) but without being obliged to make premature decisions about which of several possible pieces of information to give preference to, or which of several possible interpretations or hypotheses to select.
It's a cliché to talk about genealogy as being like trying to piece together a jigsaw to try to form a picture of a person's life, but the analogy is such as good one, it's hard to avoid it. However, so often the task we're faced with is even harder than the hardest jigsaw puzzle. So often it's rather as if somebody had taken all of the jigsaw puzzles out of the cupboard, thrown all of the pieces into a big bag, shaken it up and thrown away the boxes. We're left with no idea what the pictures we're trying to reconstruct should look like and, what's more, not only do we need to put the pieces together in the right way, we also need to disentangle the pieces of several different puzzles from one another in the process.
What worries me about genealogy software is that at present it does nothing to help this process of piecing together information to form a coherent picture. In fact, I think it can make it harder, or encourage "bad" genealogy, by which I mean asserting as "facts" things which are unproven. If we try to use current genealogy software to construct an hypothesis, just to test out an idea, there's an immediate risk things will begin to become crystallised and open to misinterpretation as historical "truth" rather than theory. As soon as we record a piece of information against an individual, however tentative that assignment, that data begins to look like a "fact". As soon as we connect two people together, however unsure we are of that connection, that link begins to look like a solid bond.
Let's consider another example. Imagine we're trying to identify the parents of a child baptised in 1799, son of a William and Mary Lock. We search the marriage indexes and identify two possible couples called William and Mary Lock in the right area at the right time. The one couple were married the year before the child's baptism in the village a mile or so down the road. The other couple were married twenty miles away 10 years previously. The temptation will be for us to attach the child to the first couple as their son because they seem so much more likely to be the "right" couple based on the available information. And immediately, however much we ourselves might still have the outside possibility of his belonging to the second couple in the back of our minds as an alternative to be remembered, we have set that relationship in stone and there's a risk it has become a "fact". We ourselves might forget about the second couple. If we publish our data online, no one else will know we still considered this a possible link, that's for sure.
link those sources together to form connections where the information they provide relates to the same "fact" (e.g. a date of birth taken from a birth certificate and an age taken from a census or death certificate) and enable us to highlight the degree to which the information is or is not consistent, with confidence levels assigned to each source, and the ability to comment on our reasons for those confidence levels
Forefathers is a professional family history research service based in England. If you have a genealogy project you need help with, however big or small, we'll be happy to help.
We're here already. Let us do it for you!
