Welcome To Our Family Archive

I have created this website as a place to document, preserve, organise, and share the history of both mine and Gemma’s families.

Over time, so much can be lost. Photographs become separated from names, certificates and papers are tucked away in drawers and boxes, and memories that once felt familiar begin to fade. I wanted to create somewhere that could bring those pieces back together. A place where records, images, stories, and research could sit alongside one another and help build a fuller picture of the people who came before us.

Our family history stretches across different places, landscapes, and communities. Gemma’s family story reaches into Cambridge and Ireland. Mine is rooted strongly in Cornwall on almost every side, with one important line leading out to Manchester through my grandfather and the Collins family before it came south. Together, these strands form a wider story that connects people, places, and generations.

More than names and dates, this is a record of lives, places, and belonging.

A story of people and place

Place is an important part of family history. Cornwall, especially its towns, mining landscapes, and communities, has shaped much of my own family story. Redruth, St Agnes, and the wider Cornish landscape are more than a backdrop. They are part of the history itself.

But this archive is not only about place. It is also about people: the lives they lived, the work they did, the families they raised, the hardships they faced, and the traces they left behind in documents, photographs, and memory.

Throughout this site you will find a growing collection of family photographs, certificates, census records, newspaper clippings, local history, and research notes. DNA evidence also has a place where it helps support, strengthen, or open new lines of enquiry. Used carefully, it adds another layer to the archive and helps connect the documentary record with the deeper patterns of family origin and relationship.

Built carefully from evidence

One of the reasons for creating this archive is that family history online can easily become confused. Websites such as Ancestry can be extremely useful for finding records, exploring hints, and making connections, but they also contain many public trees built on assumptions, copied information, and unverified links. Once an error appears online, it can quickly be repeated from tree to tree until it begins to look like fact.

For that reason, I want this archive to take a more careful approach. Wherever possible, the information included in our family tree will be backed up by evidence. That may include civil registration records, census returns, parish registers, newspaper reports, probate records, family documents, photographs, or DNA evidence used alongside traditional research.

Where something is uncertain, I would rather show that uncertainty honestly than present guesswork as fact. My aim is not simply to build a tree, but to create a family archive that is careful, meaningful, and reliable.

Built carefully from evidence, not assumption.

An ongoing archive

This is very much an ongoing project. Some parts of the family story are already clear, while others remain incomplete or uncertain. There will always be more to uncover, more to verify, and more stories to piece together.

My hope is that this site becomes more than a collection of records. I want it to be a lasting archive of both our families, preserving the connections between people, places, and memory before they are lost to time.

In the end, this is about keeping those connections alive and creating something that future generations can return to, explore, and build upon.

More than anything, I wanted this to be a lasting record. Not just a family tree, but a living archive that helps preserve something of the people and places that might otherwise be forgotten, taken forward and built upon by future generations.

Lee