When I settled back in Blockley during the mid-1950's, I began researching my mother's family including her brothers, sisters and all my cousins and their spouses.

I then started to research my grandmother, grandfather and their brothers and sisters. I found I was researching three main names - Dicks, Taylor and Keyte.

Several of the names that came into the scheme by marriage seemed to overlap.

After only a few years I had several branches of families living in Blockley from 1750 to the present generation. Research became more and more difficult as you went back in time. Some family members were frightened in case skeletons came out of the closet and therefore refused to co-operate on principle. Others were just not interested and their attitude was that they did not know the people so why should I be interested

To try and fit these differing names into the tree later became a nightmare. One relative, a devout Baptist, was baptised into the Church of England only days before their marriage. This was to avoid religious problems in the future maintenance of their children.

At a Registry Office looking for one marriage certificate I found by accident that another relative had actually married 17 years after the birth of their child. These are the sorts of things you uncover in your research that are very sensitive to those involved, but add huge interest to the researcher who faithfully records the details for posterity.

Over the years I came across many family members related only to me by marriage who were willing to share their research. This opened up avenues that speeded up my own research. Lost family members scattered throughout the world started to write to me with inquiries and contributing their own branch details. For nearly 30 years it was a slow and laborious labour of love.

Trips to registry offices and ultimately London to check birth, marriage and death certificates became costly and time consuming. Visits to burial sites in all sorts of weather proved difficult and sometimes impossible. All this collected information was carefully drawn by hand in neat squares on to rolls of sectional. This was painstakingly transferred to spreadsheets on a word processor.

I made numerous trips to local libraries. At the time I was also researching local history for future talks. I picked up many interesting news items as well as getting correct dates from the Evesham Journal records deposited in Evesham Library.

With the help of a computer and e-mail my previous research began to take off, as it was such a speedy way of asking for and receiving information. Because of the world time differences you could ask a question at 7pm and the answer would be waiting for you when you awoke the next day. After only a short delay the latest Family Tree Maker was installed and all the hand written research was put into the programme. With the help of fine-tuning by 'cousins' from round the world, I was able to iron out some problems and merge various family branches on to a named Family Tree.

This was overtaken when so many family's names went back further than the one previously entered. In the end the consensus of world family opinion was that if you were on this Family Tree you were related by marriage and we would refer to each other as 'cousin'.

I felt it was time to call the whole project BLOCKLEY FAMILIES TREE.

Over the years I have had many visitors to Blockley who were directed to me for help in establishing their family roots. This has proved time consuming in the past, but now with a computer programme it is invaluable as most have a common bond with me and are willing to share further research.

In only six months from installing a computer I can report that the Blockley Families Tree contains over 90% of all the family's living in Blockley between 1750 and 1925 who were related by marriage. Many researchers visiting me are thrilled that the information is now centrally collated on my computer and suggest that other large villages may have a similar situation, but may not be recorded.

Members of the family research teams across the world now have access to census records, wills and other genealogy files and between them they can now answer most questions within 24 hours of a request.

This is something I never dreamed of when I started on this huge task over 40 years ago.

I have a cousin in Canada, Gordon Beavington, who is currently researching the census records for Gloucestershire. The interest in this subject is growing and I would like to think that by the end of the year further sprigs would be added to the branches on my huge family tree. I have retyped and reformatted all Blockley Records from 1538 to the present day in alphabetical order.

All my voluntary research has been freely given to the Blockley Antiquarian Society and has been deposited with the Public Record Offices at Worcester and Gloucester.