The prompt for this week is “challenge”. Well, how to pick just one challenge is a bit of a challenge. To me, genealogy is an ongoing challenge in which we use our detective skills to ferret out as much information as possible about our ancestors and families. Considering it’s the start of the year, I thought I would share one of my earlier challenges.

When I first got serious about doing my family history, I wrote down what I knew about my immediate family. I knew without asking the names of my grandmother’s but needed some help form my parents on the names of my grandfathers, as they had both passed before I was able to know them. I always knew that my mum had essentially grown up without a father, and so she didn’t know a lot at all about him. She knew his name and we had managed to find a few photos after my grandmother’s death but that was it. So the challenge was to find out ore about him.

My grandfather George as a young child

I went to the courthouse and asked how I would go about applying for the birth certificates of my parents, and was promptly told that I would be better off ordering marriage certificates as they were free access after 50 years whereas broths had a 100 year limit on them. So I left the courthouse with the necessary forms to order the marriage certificate of my grandparents and I promptly went home and started searching online for the necessary information. This was when I hit my first snag: my search for a George Nichols marrying a Jean Thompson returned no results.

Perplexed, I approached my mum and said I couldn’t find her parents marriage certificate. We both scratched our heads over it for a while, until we remembered that my grandmother had been married before so would have been married under her first husband’s surname. So off I went again armed with the correct surname this time and after a bit of fiddling with spelling, I hit gold. Once I received the certificate I had an approximate birth date for him and a mother’s name. But no father’s name, which is an ongoing challenge of mine to find out who his father was.

Being new to family history, I was so excited to have found the information and I distinctly recall being asked a few years later about my family history and excitedly sharing the news that I was now able to order my grandfather’s birth certificate as the 100 year time limit had passed (it being 2010 at the time). To my disappointment, the person scoffed at me stating it was “impossible” that my grandfather had been born in 1910 considering my mother was born in 1961. However, I know the truth of my findings.

So that’s my challenge post, but the challenge of finding out my grandfathers father is ongoing as is challenging people’s perceptions about family history in general and on a more personal level. But I admit to enjoying a challenge and will continue forward with my passion.

The prompt for Week 2 of #52 ancestors is Favourite Photo. Since starting family history research I have gathered together quite a collection of photos from various family members, some of which have been unseen by other family members for generations. So, it is hard for to pinpoint just one photo as a favourite. I have decided that one of my ultimate favourites is the photo below of my mother Wendy Nichols and her sister Jayne, taken sometime in the 1960s. My mother is the one on the right with her sister Jayne on the left.

This is one of the first photos that became part of my collection, and I remember asking my mother about it and she can remember getting ready the night before the picture was taken. She can’t remember exactly how old she was, but she does remember the photo being taken and that it was before her parents marriage broke up. My mother was lucky enough that she had natural curls, so her preparation was pretty basic. However, she remembers her sister Jayne as having have her hair done up in rags so that she would have  beautiful curls for the photo. The two girls are dressed in identical dresses which were handmade by my grandmother, as nearly all of their clothes were.

I have always loved this photo not just because it allows me to see what my mother was like as a child but because I grew up hearing a lot about her sister Jayne. One of my middle names is Jayne so it was explained to me why my parents had chosen that name. Jayne was only a year older than my mother and so they were very close when growing up. Unfortunately, Jayne died at the age of 20 following kidney failure as a result of contracting Nephritis at the age of 14 and in her memory I was given her name as a middle name. As a relatively young child, I accepted that this was a sad event and promptly forgot about it except when people asked about my middle name. However, I can remember at the age of about 9-10 coming across a photo that I hadn’t seen before and upon asking who it was I was told that this was Jayne as a young woman before she died.

At the time, I didn’t think anything much of it beyond that it was a photo of someone I’d never met but in later years as a teenager I revisited the photo and realised that I resembled her. My mother had been telling me this for years and, being a teenager, I didn’t believe her but now I could see the resemblance. As an even older teenager, this realisation made me sad as my grandmother had gotten dementure which worsened as she aged and got sicker. I was just seventeen and a half years old when she died and in the last days and weeks before she died I can remember visiting her and not being recognised as Samantha, her granddaughter, but as her daughter Jayne.