I’ve been playing a game this week. Basically you put your name and birthday in this website, then your moms and dads, then their mom and dads.. and then this green leaf appears..

Then you press on the leaf and you find out who their mom and dad are. I got my dad’s family back to 1490. Their original family name was “Daft” – but changed to Newman some time in the 50’s (luckily for us).

It’s pretty addictive when you get into it. There’s all kinds of records available. You’ll mostly be using birth records, death records and marriage records to fill the tree in. But every now and then you find something cool like this:

That’s a record from the post office.. showing that Frank Daft in 1935 got a job as a post man! That was either my grandad on my dads side.. or his dad!

The further you go back the more common ancestors you share. So the more chance that stuff is already researched for you. This is cool but it’s hard to trust the accuracy of some of it. No matter how awesome it would be.

or how sad it would be..

Anyway its fun and I’m gonna keep on digging. It’s funny how much this feels like a fun game ??