Concentrating on the male line

Tim be veri careful of zer pwonunsations and non messing about wiv Kato !

 

Reading about Scottish certificates makes me wish for some Scottish ancestors. Sadly it would appear I have none.

 

I rather think Elizabeth would have enjoyed this reaction to her comment, which arose from long experience as a genealogist and lecturer in family history. Fortunately, even though she died a few years ago, people still have time for her and her contribution to family history as the Elizabeth Simpson Award for local family history magazines, instituted out of respect for her services to family history over the years, has just been awarded for 2014 by the Federation of Family History Societies.

For myself, I try to follow all my lines equally where I can, but obviously the rarer names are often easier. I find I am very interested in the derivation of names and place-names and really enjoy collecting new surnames from the females in my various lines and researching their families and the different places they came from. And, as the recent research in connection with Richard III has shown, maternal lines can sometimes prove crucially important! However, as has already been said on this forum, there is room for all sorts of different interests within family history research, whether specialised or general.

 

Pat - if you feel bad about this, don't. We all made a mess of this when new to the forum, particularly trying to reduce what we were quoting.

 

In Switzerland we have a national "Senior Citizen's Association". This offers courses for the over 60's for Sport, foreign languages, artistic hobbies, in fact for everything.

I entered a course for genealogy, knowing that I only had German ancestors which would not be covered by this. However, my husband is Swiss so maybe one time I can put it to use. It is similar to Germany in that the archives are not centralized.

I was one of only two women in the class and questioned this (in a friendly manner of course) and received the reply that the male line was the only important one. I wasn't actually questioning this but the fact that few women had attended.

My neighbour first bore a daughter but six years later, the long awaited "Stammhalter" "lineage holder" arrived and was treated as such. Guess who visits the parents frequently? The daughter.

Strangely enough, when I started my Research with my grandfather's name of Pfisterer, I was not so interested in his wife's name.

However, since then, I have had some insight into my great grandmother's life. Her first husband died when he was young and she married again. In all the English census entries, she gave her place of birth allowing me to trace her (with help of a friend). She took her two young sons back to Germany to be baptised and returned to England.

When I first came to Switzerland, women were not allowed to vote but it was a "known" fact that, although tied to the kitchen most of the time, the female instructed her male partner for what he should vote.