© Joe Douglas. 2016

When I started looking at my family history my objective was to try and identify the source of the brown ‘afro’ type curly hair that I had inherited from my father.

He had a half sister on his mother’s side and her son Mattie had the same hair so I was pretty sure it was from my Grandmother’s family and that was where I started. Initially I used the Family Historian program to organise and store the information and the ‘Douglas’ tree was growing. I worked quickly got back to 1800 on my Grandmother’s side - the Little Family.

 The Douglas side was a bit more complicated as my great grandfather Thomas, had been married twice. He had three children with his first wife, who died. He married again, had two children and then he died. As he did all in less than ten years between two censuses it took quite a while to positively identify the connections and identify his parents.

About this time my cousin organised a family get together for the families of my mothers siblings. The family name was Launder which was introduced to Cockermouth by Nicholas Launder, my great grandfather. He came to Cockermouth from Beer Ferris near Plymouth in Devon so I added the Launder line to my tree to show to my cousins at the family ‘do’.

This led to including the Charters family, my maternal grandmothers family to the tree.

I made contact with a distant cousin, John. N. M. Charters who had investigated the Charters family in the 1960’s. He gave me a detailed summary of his information, (27 handwritten A5 reporters note book pages), which was a great help. I had very little knowledge of the Charters family as there had been a family rift in my grandmothers time.

Using John’s notes I was able to fill in many gaps and the whole tree was growing fast and I realised it was likely to get un-manageable.

My problem was that I hadn’t kept control of who I added and was wandering round trees that were only linked into mine by marriage. In effect I think I had fallen into the trap of collecting names rather than identifying my genetic relatives. I decided to restrict my tree to family member spouses and their descendants and not their ancestors.

For example the wife of my Uncle would be included because their children would be my cousins but her siblings and their children would not be related other than as ‘In-Laws’

I didn’t stick rigidly to this with ‘in-laws’ rule where the connections were more personal.

As of February 2016 my tree contains over 1270 people and goes back to around 1650 in Devon and 1750 in Southern Scotland.

Of my eight great grandparents seven were born within 15 miles of Cockermouth and the eighth one, Nicholas Launder, was born at Beer Ferris, near Plymouth, in Devon.

My Family Tree