In April 2021, following 34 years working for the Civil Service in my home area of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire in the East Midlands of England, I made a dream reality by assimilating my lifetime of interest and experience in family and local history research into my profession. More than three years later, I have researched and authored numerous studies for customers, often receiving further orders from people who love my work.  The joy that I gain from enriching the lives of others by providing a knowledge of their family’s past is my motivation.

I feel fortunate to have inherited knowledge of many of my ancestors as a teenager from my grandfather, Sidney Beech. The knowledge that he shared fired my imagination and instilled a sense of being part of a genetic and emotional chain of people stretching back into the mists of time; people whose physical and character attributes leave traces in me, my relatives of today and tomorrow. I am fascinated by the impact that every day decisions made by ancestors can have for our own existence. For me the magic of ancestral research is derived from piecing together information that enables me to build a picture of who a person really was. What was their life like? What skills did they have? What were the major events that shaped their life? Most of humankind lives a relatively low-profile life, working hard to feed and protect their loved ones. This doesn’t mean that most people aren’t exceptional, and for me their lives are just as interesting as the glamorous, rich and famous.

Sidney Beech died in 1991, before the internet expanded genealogy research possibilities to an exciting degree. He would have loved to be able to research using online resources as I have done for more than 20 years. With patience and a lot of time a keen amateur, as I was for many years, can discover many snapshots of information to understand something of a person’s life and where they lived. Experience has taught me the wider tools and approaches to establish the validity of each ancestor before adding them to a family tree and searching for their earlier ancestors.

I look forward to helping you discover your roots.

Jonathan Beech