The Beginnings
My interest in Family History research began in the late 1980's following a long association with the late Alfred Elmhirst of Houndhill, near Barnsley, South Yorkshire, who very kindly lent me a copy of the privately-published Elmhirst family history, "The Peculiar Inheritance", which traces the Elmhirst family back to 1349.  He also lent me the 2 bound volumes of "The Elmhirst Evidences", 1,500 pages of handwritten research material compiled by Edward Elmhirst-Baxter, who researched, wrote and  published "The Peculiar Inheritance".  I was fascinated by the amount of public material that was available for research if one knows where to look for it; and so I was hooked into researching my own family history.

By the time I began however, most of my older relatives were long gone.  I rapidly became aware of how little I knew about even my own father's early life, and the opportunity to ask him was no longer available to me; he passed away in 1983.  My mother provided some information about the Webb family, but she became less able to remember much at all as a result of a series of strokes and she finally died in April 1998.  My father's elder brother, Frank, gave me a start by providing information about his father, and some dubious information about his grandfather but, sadly, he died in 1995 having suffered for years with Parkinson's Disease.

During my research, I have amassed several volumes of notes and research material, all carefully indexed and catalogued.  I slavishly follow the old maxim "Record everything, sort out the good from the bad, but never throw anything away", and I am spurred on by a dedication I read many years ago as a child in a history book, the title of which I can no longer remember:-