I have been engaged with tracing my family history for the best part of 10 years now, and have thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of it. It does take up a lot of time but the hours seemed to slip by almost unnoticed. There have been many a sleep interrupted night when in an attempt to nod myself off to sleep I have come downstairs and dug into the research once more. It’s like playing a detective game, why did that person born there end up living there and married to that person. You have to tap into all manner of source information to unravel some of the questions, including social history, and many questions remain unanswered. The genealogy sites with online access to many of the digitized national records are a goldmine of information, but as too are census records, newspaper archives, other peoples published family trees, forums and chat rooms, and of course a visit to the National Archives at Kew is eye popping in its vastness.
The background to creating this website was for me the conundrum I was facing. After years of research I had created a treasure trove of Summerfield and related families information and trivia, all stored in a commercial genealogy programme. But what I really wanted was to make all this information more accessible and relevant to both share the information with anyone of the present time who might be interested in it, but also to make a record for future generations who might at some point find themselves interested in looking into the past. I sorely regret not having had more interest earlier in my life and the conversations with parents and grandparents about their lives, it would have made the task more fulfilling, definitely easier and probably more accurate.
You will see a number of variations of the surname spelling over the years, often a different spelling for the same person in different documents over the course of their life. I have not taken too much notice of the different spellings as the entries have usually been made by another person with lots of room for inaccuracies of transcription. There is also the issue of illiteracy, especially the further we go back in time, many of the entries are authenticated with ‘the mark of’ usually an X. Spelling again in the hands of the transcriber. Naturally this hasn’t helped with the research as it would be dangerous to assume that a different spelling is a different family, although obviously sometimes it has been. Also, prior to about 1700 the Parish Registers were written in Latin, yet another headache in the research.
Records prior to the compulsory Civil registration which was introduced in 1837 are also complicated to work with. These in the main have been Parish Registers which with the Royal Decree from the court of Henry VIII in 1538, ordered that all births, marriages and deaths to be recorded, but in my experience this didn’t always seem to happen. I also looked at Wills and Probates where available which would often confirm family members that had been discovered in the Registers. There seems to be have been quite a few Summerfield, and the name variations, families around in my historical starting point of Cheshire, in the 16, 17 and 18th centuries, which of course added to the difficulties of identifying with any degree of certainty our particular family line.