Origin story? I think I was born this way.... :D

Hello everyone.

I've been a member of Lost Cousins since 2010 and lurking around the forum for a day or two, so thought it would be polite to introduce myself.

What got me started? Well, I’ve always been fascinated by family trees. Every novel I read got reduced to a descendency chart. Did you know that the chart for the Earnshaws and Lintons in Wuthering Heights is like a perfectly balanced set of scales, with Heathcliff as the fulcrum?

Then, just for fun, I worked out the Queen’s lineage, right back to Adam (the Wessex Kings claimed descent from Woden, who in turn was said to descend from the Biblical patriarchs). I spent many hours feeding foolscap sheets into my Mum’s Remington, typing up a neatly stepped chart of prophets, deities, kings, queens, cousins and consorts, and taping them all together like a cryptic quilt.

When I was thirteen I came across some old family certificates - births and deaths from 1840 to 1875, where millers and coachmen and railway guards and labourers stepped up like figures out of a fairy tale. I’ve been an amateur family historian ever since, eventually inheriting and expanding on the work of my aunt and great-aunt, and staking out my husband’s ancestors too.

Both sides of my family are Anglo-Indian, which makes for a very diverse heritage. Calcutta around 1800 seems rather like present-day Dubai or Sydney, with adventurers and malcontents from all over Europe turning up to try something new. An unlikely assembly of Scottish, Irish, English, Welsh, French, Portuguese, Danish and Indian folk came together in 18th-19th century India to create the genome that is me.

My profile image is my mother's mother's mother on her wedding day. If I had a picture of her mother or grandmother I would have used that. Why shouldn't we celebrate the lost names of the female line - it's just as important as the male edge of the pedigree?

Finally, I very much want to thank Peter for the Lost Cousins site. His newsletter is the only Family Tree newsletter subscription I've maintained, and I've been there since the beginning of email