When I began my Behind the Lines adventure (see the various previous posts for more) I realised to make sense of the journey I was to embark on, I was first going to have to do a hell of a lot of digging into the how my great uncle ended up where and how he did.
So like many, I began to look into tracing this side of my family tree. Also like many others before me, I got discouraged very quickly. There seemed to be too many sources of information to opt between, all telling me slightly different ways to start, and all of which got me nowhere however hard I tried.
So I took a step back, wrote down everything I already knew (not a great deal) and started from scratch myself. Eventually I ended up with a 400 page word document, focussed largely around my great uncle’s otherwise unknown war years. And I’d become something of an amateur-expert on how to go about this sort of research.
Fearing I might forget everything I’d learnt if I needed to come back to it later, I began writing everything I did down. I realised I had a document that might be useful to others in tracing their family trees too, especially if it included men who fought during the Second World War. I cleaned up the language, made it as simple as I could, and uploaded it as a short ebook to amazon – meaning you can take a look for yourselves with the desktop app or a Kindle.
Great idea Ian. Hopefully it will be of use to others