About the Butler-McArdle family tree blog

In 1973, one of my mother's British cousins posted her a copy of a typewritten family tree, going back to the 1700s. This tree was on foolscap paper, and detailed names, dates, places and interesting facts about each of the ancestors Mum's cousin had found information on. Right at the back of the typed notes was one last page which had a hand drawn family tree on it, summarising the people in the typed document. I was 12, and I fell in love with the romance of knowing who my ancestors were.

My father, Hugh McArdle Butler, told me little about his ancestry. I was dying to fill in the gaps for both sides of my genealogy, but he would say mysterious things like, 'You don't know for sure. Any child on that tree could have been fathered by someone else, so the people you think are your ancestors, may not be.' I often wondered if he was trying to gently let me into a family secret!

Dad passed away in 1998, but since then the internet has improved, the volume of data available for research has grown exponentially, and I have been able to track down some of the people who (on paper!), would appear to be my ancestors on Dad's side.

I have built several of my family trees on Ancestry.com as well as Genesreunited.com, but it annoys me that I can't present the information the way I want to. For several years I've played with different types of hyperlinked formats, such as Word docs in html, but of course they are still private and don't allow others doing their family research to find people in my tree that might be important to them.

So, in the interests of lateral thinking, this blog site is a way of adding to my father's family tree in the hope that it helps others and that they, in turn, can help me.

Where you see a hyperlinked name on any page, then that means that I have managed to create a dedicated page for that person. There may not be much information on it, but they matter enough that I think there will be more information coming at some stage.

This is, and always will be, a work in progress. I started it on 6 October 2013, so we will see how far it goes over the next few years! Check back from time to time as I will create data in spates, then have a session where I upload images, so if it looks a little boring in early October 2013, then please don't despair - there should be more coming in time!

If you find a document on this site which helps you with your research, please feel free to 'right click, save a copy'. And conversely, if you have any information or documents which you think will be useful for me, please Contact me and I will give you an email address to send them to.

Cheers!

Jenny Mosher