For the Forum’s meeting on the 17th of February the Deputy Chairman Colin Gaden took the chair.
The guest speaker for the meeting was Mike Greatorex from Harrogate who has devoted a large proportion of his retirement to researching his family history and this formed the subject of his talk entitled “Family History: The Trials and Tribulations”.
Mike gave us guidance into the procedures to be followed if we wanted to delve into our own families’ backgrounds such as obtaining birth and marriage certificates, how to access census and other useful records and the importance of speaking to other family members. Mike then described some of his research into his own family. His father had mentioned that his own father had been born in Philadelphia but knew no more details and this spurred Mike into deeper research. Mike made a number of contacts in the USA who revealed Greatorex relatives in New York state and Alabama including a lady who had married four times (once bigamously) and a soldier who had sold his kit. Mike invited questions from the members and it was obvious that many of us were very interested in his subject from the number of questions raised. Colin Gaden drew the meeting to a close by proposing a vote of thanks which was well supported.