In 2001, my father read a newspaper article that announced the publication of the 1901 Scotland census online, and he asked me to see if I could find the family of his mother, Flora Clark. She had died when he was a small child and he knew almost nothing about her beyond the information recorded in her birth certificate, which showed that she was born in Lanarkshire in 1890.
As father was from Portsmouth, he never met any of his mother’s Scottish relatives, or even knew of their existence, so to say he was stunned when my research revealed that Flora was the youngest in a family of 12 children would be an understatement !
I have always enjoyed solving puzzles, and it was this discovery that first sparked my interest in genealogy as it presented such an intriguing mystery: how did Flora end up living on the south coast of England so far away from her siblings ? Uncovering the story of the Clarks quickly became a quest and, as many other novice family historians have discovered, once I started investigating, it was impossible to stop …
Sleuthing Notes 