I find that both Find My Past and Ancestry.co.uk are excellent resources for researching family history. Infact it is virtually impossible to manage without sites like these. I remember spending days at public records offices and libraries in my early years of researching but now it is nearly all online. I can't help but miss those days out though. I have such fond memories of eating a sandwich in the sunshine, watching the signets on the pond outside the Public Records Office at Kew. Everyone was so chatty and you could build up quite a freindship with other regulars in those days. We offered each other advice and compared notes. The "help" section on a family history website doesn't quite seem the same. I suppose that is the price for technology!
Without the internet, I doubt I would have been able to find out anything about the family in a collection of recent photos I purchased. There were very few clues, but a magazine cutting gave me a starting point.
One of the men in the photo is in other photos of a couple identified as Mum and Dad, but how to find which is his name as they are not identified individually in the photo. Another of the photos was of two young women in the back yard of a house with the caption Doreen and Lilian 308 Boundary Road, St Helens 1952.
With this information I could search the 1939 register on Find My Past which has a really useful address search option. I scrolled to number 308 and the family who lived where the Brownbill family. I had found the family so quickly. William and his wife Elizabeth with their daughters Doreen and Lily. Without the internet I'm sure it would have been days of trawling through files at The Public Records Office. For anyone who is trying to research family around that time I have found the 1939 register to be one of the most useful resources. I can now add photos of the Brownbill family to the website in the hope that one day a family member may find them.
