Why I Started My Family Tree

I promised in my last post that I’d answer the why I started my family tree, and so here I am.

But [I can hear my old English teacher turning in his grave at starting a sentence with ‘but’], technically I didn’t. As far as I know it started with my 1st cousin 1 x removed. Or, put another way, one of my father’s cousins.

Chris, sometimes known as ‘Fer’ in family circles was a Jesuit priest and fluent in several languages which allowed him to cross the language barriers that allowed him to interact with my extended family in Holland and Germany. It also, I believe, became a passion as well as a means to stay in touch with the family.

Before I go on, I need to step back in my history and add an explanation for what appears to be a lack of knowledge on my part. The vast majority of my childhood saw me living in one foreign country or another due to my father’s job. Later on saw me being educated at several private boarding schools for, so I was told, stability of my education! Because of this, I saw little of my grandparents on both sides; the agreement was always my mum’s parents for half-term and start and end of term for a day or two with my father’s parents. And because of this, I saw little of my extended family and as a consequence missed out on major family events.

The first big family event I recall clearly is Manchester 1985. Fr. Chris (fer) and Liz were the primary instigators behind this, and it was here that I first saw the vast majority of my family for a grand gathering and mass to celebrate 100yrs of the Dyckhoff’s in the UK. It was here that I got to meet family I don’t ever recall meeting before, and I got to start to see the power of a family. That day is better described by Liz over on one of the history pages.

I struggle to this day to put names to faces and that isn’t helped by time and distance but I have done my best to try to maintain familial links.

Anyway, that’s an aside. So that’s the history bit, now back to the why.

The next major gathering of the D’s was in 2003 and the ‘excuse‘ used this time was Great Aunt Hilda’s 100th birthday, and so as a family we took over a hotel in southern Holland for a weekend. It was here that Fr. Chris presented the family tree on paper and each family represented got a copy. That tree started with my great-grandfather, Carl Dyckhoff, and included the newest members, that being my very own youngest Coel, who was born mid-2002.

Not only that, we also all got a copy of the extended research that Fer had done, which includes an entry dated from 1600, and went sideways to parts of the family I’d never met, nor heard of.

Seeing those trees in print sparked something in me, and so 2yrs later when my media degree (I talked about that in my last post) needed me to create a website from scratch, it struck me as this was a good thing to do.

Firstly, it would allow me to digitise the tree despite some objections in the extended family around privacy issues. Secondly, it triggered a desire in me to re-connect and try to keep the tree as up to date as possible. The third reason was that Fer wasn’t getting any younger, and who is, so this was a means to continue the flame. The final reason for taking this on, is that I didn’t want Fer’s hard work to be lost and it gave me a reason to try and connect, re-connect or stay connected with family both near and far.

Subsequently when Fer passed away in 2013 I became acutely aware that nobody in the remaining family had taken on the mantle and so I was very glad to have done what I did. With help from some of Fer’s immediate family, and others from that generation (Jenny, Liz & Roy) my online tree was corrected and updated.

Since the passing of all of the above, I remain grateful if only for myself that I took this on. What stared as a means to an end has become a passion. It has become a time sink and something I can easily be absorbed by for hours at an end. It has enabled me to find connections I never previously could but knew had to exist. It led me to other software (Filae, FamilyEcho, BillionGraves, etc), all of which in gave me different insights or evidence or even ways to present the data to share with family.

But more of that in the future.