One of my interests is researching my family tree. I've done fairly well with it (I'm back past UK registration on all sides bar illegitimates where the parent isn't known). I have a few interesting or frustrating ancestors here and there.
One sort of sad thing is that I only seem to like my relatives when they are long dead...
Anyone else like doing their family trees?
Oh the census... there have been times when I've gone though the census by hand because of no results on Ancestry (thank goodness my ancestors lived in small places!) only to find that I didn't get any results because according to Ancestry my ancestor Thomas Milburn was really called Thomase Millison living with his father John Milliron... My favourite have got to be my Carter family that I found transcribed as "Leota"... I mean, no wonder I didn't find them 
Sometimes a dead end requires a new angle of attack... a clean fresh pair of eyes... or a chance find... The "Irish" ancestor I mentioned, William Brady, appears as an 18 year old boarder, which was why my family thought he came from Ireland (Irish name + not on previous census = Irish immigrant, which wasn't a bad theory apart from being entirely wrong). After I also failed to find him, I eventually looked at the family he was living with... sure enough, several censuses earlier, I found his mother living there and the wall tumbled down- the family he was with was his grandmother's brother, and his birth had been registered under his mother's married name, and the last census he took his stepfather's surname before reverting to her maiden name 
Those are moments when you just punch the air and hiss "yesssss!!"
I believe FindMyPast has the deaths at sea records. I don't know if they are anywhere else.
Oh the census... there have been times when I've gone though the census by hand because of no results on Ancestry (thank goodness my ancestors lived in small places!) only to find that I didn't get any results because according to Ancestry my ancestor Thomas Milburn was really called Thomase Millison living with his father John Milliron... My favourite have got to be my Carter family that I found transcribed as "Leota"... I mean, no wonder I didn't find them
Sometimes a dead end requires a new angle of attack... a clean fresh pair of eyes... or a chance find... The "Irish" ancestor I mentioned, William Brady, appears as an 18 year old boarder, which was why my family thought he came from Ireland (Irish name + not on previous census = Irish immigrant, which wasn't a bad theory apart from being entirely wrong). After I also failed to find him, I eventually looked at the family he was living with... sure enough, several censuses earlier, I found his mother living there and the wall tumbled down- the family he was with was his grandmother's brother, and his birth had been registered under his mother's married name, and the last census he took his stepfather's surname before reverting to her maiden name Those are moments when you just punch the air and hiss "yesssss!!"
I believe FindMyPast has the deaths at sea records. I don't know if they are anywhere else.
