I am Lee Westwood. A father of 3, grandfather of 3 and a husband of 1!

I started researching my own family tree over 25 years ago. Having been retired since 2022, I now spend even more time researching Ancestry for friends, family and now for you and I find it thoroughly fascinating. I enjoy the painstaking work to uncover and validate records - the sleuthing! It needs a high degree of thoroughness to ensure that the evidential records are correct. One mistake and everything from that point can be wrong! But then there is the social history!

Whilst we can find records for our immediate parents, aunts and uncles, the truth is that the real gems are uncovered about those from the turn of the 20th century. Those who went through the First World War, maybe the Boer War and certainly the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution have remarkable stories to tell. The work that those people did is incredible. Most of those jobs no longer exist. Machinery took over as the Industrial Revolution surged ahead! To read what my forbears did to eke out a living is genuinely moving. It makes you realise how hard life could be in those times when the vast majority of the population really was “working class”. How they lived when there were regularly 10 or more children of a single family living in a Victorian 2 up 2 down terraced house or a ‘court house’ where a couple of rooms were rented for an entire family or maybe in a small tied cottage on a farm. And how they died! Infant mortality was high. The 1911 census records how many children in the family were born alive, how many were still living and how many had died!

Where did our forebears come from. My maternal grandparents were from as far apart as Newport in South Wales and Newcastle in the English north east! How did those two people who were born 300 miles apart, before the First World War, come to meet and marry?

There are ups and downs to be unearthed. Who made good and who met a sorry end. The tales are never ending. Some joyous, some devastatingly sad. It is a real journey of discovery.

I look forward to helping you uncover your story…