'ST.JOHN' Family Genealogy UK

I have been researching my family tree now for some time. Not as many years as some people - 7 to be exact.  This does not include asking questions and being generally interested in the family stories or tales that we heard as children.  

After my child was born I found the time to take up other interests and this is just one of them.  I have found Genealogy very, very interesting  finding facts and resources - being able to search using the internet - and now using Ancestry.co.uk - I have the bug, I have been bitten by my past! I am now into genealogy. Looking into the past and finding out all sorts of interesting things about the family - what they did where they lived.  Now there are a lot of ancestry packages out there, an awful lot.  Search have a read and you decide which one to join.

With all family research we have to start somewhere - so naturally you out in what you know and you gather information from family members to what they can help you with and then you need help.  So for me this is Ancestry.co.uk. An excellent resource for those of us that do it.  It is not a cheap past-time and it can get extremely expensive if we allow it too.  All info has to come from somewhere. Normally this is birth, death and Marriage certificates. Fine we say we can do that!!  But what we don't realise is that there are members of families who don't want to participate.  Well this is fair enough and whilst mentioning this I must just say that ALL family trees on Ancestry DO NOT show LIVING people to others - this is private information and is only available to the tree owner.  I personally like this.

SO on we go to researching -  we then have the census sheets, thousands of them and if we treck back and double check everything we will find our anscestors -  too a degree!  Great we are on our way to learning and absorbing, seeing our tree grow.  But the info is only available to a certain era.  Much of the info we need is in parish records and a lot of information has been lost over the centuries - and we as a country here in the UK and I suspect worldwide really, were not really very good at keeping records for us 'Normal' everyday people.  So what do we do?  How do we find out these things? Where on earth do we look?

Well this is why I started this blog.  I can go to the library, I can search online, if I was rich I could buy certificates from online sources all of which we can go into later.  But I am not.  I am limited to the internet as well as Library and from finding links in others family trees, but somewhere we have to go further and find out more..... Other family trees are at the same point as I am -  and to find out other things and information it is time to share!

I know this much I have come to the time of researching big time and I know there must be lots of people trying to find out the same things and asking the same questions.  

UK 'St.John's' are my research - I know there are a lot of 'St.John's' out there and I know that an awful lot are from the USA. Please join in and blog about this HUGE family, the exciting Peerage side, the Royal links, and the normal everyday people with nice links to the past.

I look forward to hearing what you have to say how you research and where you go and what you do to find information other than just what we know we can find. Books, tv programs, magazines, family member stories anything about family research.