FAMILY HISTORY AND FINDING THE LINKS

It could be said that ‘Cornish family history’ is often the starting point for what is for most a very personal quest that leads the curious to remote parts of Cornwall, with instances of names which many cannot pronounced. Ye it is these old enclosures of granite walls that do much to indicate what it may have been like in previous generations of occupiers.

Touch the granite, stand in the fields or on the now barren moors, and the solitary cliffs, and listen not just to the winds but to oneself, all of which can provide a feeling of something of the old long gone inhabitants, that gives a link between those and today’s generation. It goes some way to providing the links between the past and what is todays family trees, it gives a meaning to the findings, which when written creates an emotional swell of feeling that allows the imagination to roam. Sometimes to the extent, that genealogy no longer becomes a cold, crisp exercise in pure research, but more a search for knowledge, not only of the past but also something of what and where we are at this present time.

If family history is then the starting point of this quest for knowledge, the answer for many then lies in seeking a common cause, be it a name or names, with others of a similar understanding of the family community. Of creating family groups, who in turn are prepared to entertain in the shared expression and in the difference of a separate identity, that of being just Cornish and a CARBIS to boot, wherever that may be around the world.