What am I trying to achieve with this blog?

I have always had a vague curiosity about my family origins but, until I retired in 2007, I did not have the time or the knowledge to enter the world of the family historian.  The end of formal employment liberated me to satisfy my curiosity.  Now, 7 years later, I am hooked on the subject and I have built up a considerable knowledge about my own ancestral lines and others with whom I am closely related.

It did not take long for the initial euphoria associated with creating and expanding a family tree to cool and give way to a deeper curiosity about the lives of significant individuals in that tree.  Now I take much greater pleasure in trying to reconstruct people's lives in order to understand how those lives were shaped by events at an individual, family, local, national or international level.  This evolution of my interests has now further branched out into the social history of people, issues and events associated in some way with individuals in my family history database.

During my professional career I have worked as an academic geneticist, a university manager and as the chief executive of a science park.  Skills and experience gained in all these phases of my career have been helpful in equipping me to enter the historical realm.  Like all objective disciplines, these studies demand a reverence for facts and the collecting, ordering and analysis of information are essential processes for answering the questions generated by personal curiosity.  The result of this process has been the creation of a series of essays or papers.  I find the writing process invaluable in understanding what otherwise might seem like a long series of turgid facts, which lack a sense of humanity and the interaction of human motivations and emotions. Presently I send these papers to friends and relatives who might find them interesting.  They in turn can pass them on to their contacts.  Inevitably, one's hypotheses are tested by independent minds and sometimes found to be wanting.

Useful as this approach has been, the distribution of these papers has inevitably been limited.  They cannot possibly reach more than a small fraction of the people who might find them useful or stimulating.  So, I am now trying a new approach, with the hope of reaching a wider audience  I hope by placing these papers in the public domain they will reach people with whom I have a coincidence of interest, generating comment, adding facts and insight and generally illuminating events which, while of little concern to the wider study of history, are fascinating for those people whose forebears were central players.

I have often found that a useful start to researching a new topic is to Google that topic and see what is out there.  Hopefully, this blog will reveal others, perhaps many others, who share my interest in subjects as diverse as Clipper ships, the village of Aboyne and the philosophy of Family History.  Let the experiment begin!

Don Fox
20140522
donaldpfox@gmail.com