[Anstey Nomad]

In the mid 1970s a distant relative researched one of my mother's lines and self published a book of the resulting trees. I saw a small item in the Leicester Mercury about this and wrote off to order two copies, one for my mum and one for me. I was surprised to find we were not in it, so I worked with him to add an addendum. At that stage, neither of us seemed to know very much about my mother's family, other than she thought her great grandmother's name might have been, you guessed it, Bodycote.

Ten years later, my Dad was coming up to 70 and had everything he wanted, but his mother had died when he was 12 and he only had memories of one grandfather, an aunt and a cousin, so I allowed myself a year to surprise him with a family tree!

I started off by going through the phone books in the Library and writing to everyone in the right area with the right surname. That gave me a start as I found a another of my father's cousins that way. Then I graduated to going down to London for work and taking the afternoon off to go to the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane to look at census returns on microfilm.

I then left it for years while I was wrangling children, dogs and a bad relationship and picked it up again in the late 90s. I joined Ancestry and GR and the rest, as they say, is history.

I still don't know who Joseph Bodycote's parents were though and thirty years of research on one line is completely out of the window since I did the DNA test and discovered great grandma's indiscretion!