This started out as a piece entitled "How not to trace your ancestors." but turned into "My Story.", hence it is linked to from both sections. Everyone makes their own mistakes. Here are mine.

You come to a certain time in your life. It may be that you find you have time on your hands as children have left the nest, or you've looked back on your life and started asking questions. There are many reasons a person might start to think about where they came from and who their ancestors were.

Be warned - that single seed of an idea can become an addictive pastime that will not only change your outlook on life but open new vistas to you. You will find yourself raising your eyes to look at the buildings above the shop facades, planning visits to places you had never previously heard of , wondering around cemeteries and graveyards, and boring your freinds and loved ones with tales of your discoveries.

If you really are determined to travel along this path then read on, otherwise carry on through life without ever wondering just how you came to exist with all your traits and flaws, without ever knowing why.

There are many more warnings that will be made as we venture back into the past and I shall outline a few here:

Don't start this venture hoping to find some rich or famous ancestor. You probably won't succeed, or even worse, if this is your reason, you will likely blind yourself to true facts in the desire to believe what you want to.

Never assume anything. You will discover people living at the same time in the same area with identical names. It can take a lot of work to prove which is the one you are descended from. Just one little assumption can mean that all of your work from thereon back is based on an error and those people are not your family.

You may discover things you'd rather not know. These can fall into many categories:

Believe me when I say that the only one of these that should give you any difficulties is an unmarried mother, and that is only if the father's name is not on the child's birth certificate.

As for the others they only go to show just how far your family has come on from those days and that there must have been some good in these unfortunate ancestors because you are the result of them.

If you are still determined to carry on, despite all of this, then you need to have a starting place. You will have to take some cast iron facts that you know and start comparing them to available records. As the medium we are initially using is the internet then the best place start with those facts is the 1901 Census.

Why the 1901 census? Well, there is at present, a 100 year rule for disclosure of personal data collected during a census. This is based on the premise that you are are unlikely to find anyone on it who is still alive. Therefore, in terms of this information, you should be able to find people that you, or your living relatives knew. Once you have located a proved ancestor on this census you can then start collecting information about them, sideways with their siblings and backwards with their parents.

The first piece of advice any family historian will give to a newcomer is to talk to all of their elder relations before embarking on their search. I will endorse this completely, but beware of a few pitfalls. It is not uncommon for a relative in the past to be distanced from the family for a misdemenour such as an unapproved marriage. In time they will never be known to newer generations. Time and age do tend to play tricks on people's minds so make plenty of notes, get as many names and places as you can and use these for the basis of your searches.

I cannot know the names you will be looking for and I do not know how much information you have collated so far but I suspect my story when I first started looking for my ancestors is common to many. I will relate it here to show you the pitfalls.

It was in 2002 when I heard that the 1901 census was online. I remember wondering who I had known who might be on it. My first thought was my paternal grandmother Alice Baker (nee Butcher) who, as I recollected was born in 1900.

Off I went to look for her, and indeed I found her, living in Water Lane, Ospringe, Faversham with her father Frederick Butcher and mother Florence. Naturally I started looking back further and found Frederick as a boy with his family living in Tanners Lane, Faversham, his father being a tin-plate worker from Lympne. This is turn got me interested in all things Faversham related, such as the brickworks and the gunpowder plant.

When I mentioned this to my elder brother he said that he thought our grandmother was born in 1903, not 1900. This gave me enough doubt to hold me back from any more research along this line. If he was right then she wouldn't appear on a census until 1911, so I could have been in for a long wait.

The problem was that the bug had bitten. I decided that I should have been a bit more methodical so I sat down and wrote out everything I knew about my family. It was very scant. None of my grandparents were still alive, my father had died at the age of 44 and my mother had emigrated to New Zealand. The few things I knew for certain were:

Not a lot to go on! I mulled over this for some time thinking of other clues that were buried in my memories. The only things I could think of was that the first son tended to take his fathers forename for his middle name in the Baker line and that the men seemd to marry woman a couple of years younger than them.

From the little I knew I jotted down some ideas that would match. The fact that my Great Uncle Fred appeared to have lived in Whitstable all of his life gave me a start, so perhaps:

Now I was ready to go back onto the internet, but this time through the search engines, with the words Whitstable, Butcher and Baker. This is when I discovered the difficulty with having surnames that were also trades. I persevered, bypassing all the references to Candle Stick Makers until one day I came across the details of five men who were on an Oyster Trawler on the night of the 1881 census. The crew were made up of an Edenden, a Gambrill, a Butcher and a Baker. Perhaps I had found two ancestors at once! Some people would have latched onto this information and assumed what they wanted to believe, but I had the experience of a dummy run in Faversham under my belt, so again I put this information to one side, knowing that I could always come back to it one day.

I turned back to the 1901 census. My only hope now was that grandfather Harold Butcher had been born before April 1901. Whitstable, Seasalter and the surrounding areas drew a blank as did further afield. I was about to give up when I decided to use all of Kent as a search criteria thinking his parents might have been away from home at the time of the census. This brought up half a dozen possibilities, one of which was Bromley. I sat there looking at this one, another coincidence perhaps? The only way I was going to find out was to pay my money and see the complete transcription.

A few minutes later I was looking at it. This was one of the defining moments and the point I became hooked, line and sinker. Here he was, as a two year old, with many brothers and sisters, his father and mother, and the address? 56 Park Road, Bromley.

I sat there in shock for a few minutes. Here were Great Grandparents, Great Uncles and Aunts that I had never known of. More so, I had actually lived in the very house that they had grown up in, slept in the same bedrooms, perhaps gone to the same school and I never knew.

Once I came to terms with this I realised that I had now a lot of new information to use. My gGrandfather, Charles Butcher was born at Bovingdon Green, Hertfordshire, my gGrandmother Selina at a place called Clipperfield. By the birth places of their children I could see they had also lived in Banbury, Oxford and Fenny Stratford, Bucks.

When I looked for Bovingdon on a mapping service I found that Chipperfield was a village about 3 miles away. Clipperfield doesn't exist, so this taught me to be aware of the spellings used by transcribers.

Within the hour I had found a site on the internet by Sarah Browne. She had transcribed the census data for Bovingdon, where she lived, for 1841 and 1871 as part of her university degree. Within a few minutes I had located my ggGrandfather and gggGrandfather.

Over the next few months I learned so much about these people, where they lived and their work, from other helpful internet sites. I also visited the places and got a feel for their way of life as sawyers in the forests of Hertfordshire. I learned how Charles was the first of the family to be ambitious and move on to become the manager of a woodyard. I learned how to trace Register Office Certificates and obtain them. Tracing Selina's family, the Meads taught me how differently their name was spelt on different records, of how Chipperfield became the Green, Hemel Hempstead, and of her father's work at the paper factories of Robinsons. I learned about the canals, about the decoding of the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park. I collected old pictures of these places in the times that they lived in them. At last I began to feel that I knew these ancestors of mine.

One evening, as my wife and I sat at the edge of the canal in Fenny Stratford just by where that woodyard used to be, I said that now I knew why at school I was a natural at woodwork and how I loved the smell of sawdust. She reminded me that I also loved being beside water, so perhaps that came from here as well. I thought about it for a while but decided that despite everything this still felt foreign to me. The water I wanted was the sea at Whitstable and no matter where my paternal line had come from, my home and the place that drew me back, was Whitstable.

Some time passed before I moved further with any research. I spent a day at the Family records Office in London, but wasted most of the day in finding the ropes. It became a useful learning experience rather than a informative one data wise.

Then one day, after my usual monthly search on FreeBMD after its updates, I found my Grandmothers' birth. My brother had been right, it was in 1903, so my previous work in Faversham had been on some elses family. Once the copy of her Birth Certificate had arrived I was back on track again. Her father was Fred Butcher, an OysterDredger. I tracked him on the 1881 census, his father was Henry Butcher, also an OysterDredger. Her mother was Annie Cullen. It was some time before I discovered that she later remarried and became Annie Taylor, the mysterious old lady I had met many years ago.

It is difficult to describe how much these discoveries meant to me. As a young boy coming to live in Whitstable I was soon aware that I was not one of 'them'. There was nothing malicious about it, you soon got to know who were the Natives and who were the newcomers, but you knew that you would never really belong here. Within a year from not knowing where I had come from, or where I belonged, I had found out that I was 25% a Native and 75% from all other the place. I could at last start to take an interest in my town, and engrossed myself in finding out everything I could about its history and how it had affected my ancestors.

This is the point when I found out that all the help I had received in Hertfordshire was not common to all places via the internet and the seed of an idea came into my mind. The result of that is the site you are now on.

I'm no longer as anxious about tracing my ancestors back to the year dot. In fact I spend most of my spare time helping others link their lines into the Whitstable Families. I know that as time passes the rest of my ancestors will come to me, through this site, and I hope that they would have been pleased with what I have been able to achieve so far.

Ok. So that's the way I started. From what I've written you can see that I've been very open about my mistakes and difficulties through lack of experience. You too will slip up from time to time. Be prepared to admit it when you have and go back to your last proved piece of information, then start again. Ask yourself why you are doing this and review your reasons periodically. Do you just want to be able to say, "I've traced my ancestry back to 1500.", or do you have a desire to find out as much as you can about your ancestors, because in doing so you will answer so many questions you have about yourself?

What has this brought to me as a person? It has made me learn and hone new skills, taught me to be more organised and not to accept things on face value. I can now bore the mother-in law out of the house and encourage the older generation to open up their memories to me. I feel that I can speak authoritively about the Oyster Dredgers, the Mariners and remind people today of the character of these people that reflects in the esteem that Whitstable is held in at the present time. I have made freinds with their descendants around the world as we all enjoy sharing our new discoveries with each other.

Now I'm not suggesting that you go off and start your own website for that would be too daunting for many, but one day the desire to share your knowledge may push you in that direction. Perhaps, in the future, every town and village will have a site like Oystertown which will enrich everyone's experience as they travel around the internet in virtuality to the places their ancestors lived in reality.

So now start off on your journey. Take with you those facts you've gleaned and use them as tools to unearth hidden treasures. Every now and again stop a while on your travels backward through time. Look sideways, learn about social and political history, geography, the influence of nature and wars. Then, when you feel you understand these things add a liitle of your own character to the mix and at last you will begin to truely know and understand your ancestors.

Now that you have read my story you can continue on your journey, either to carry on in the 'Getting Started' section, or by emailing your own story in so that others may share your experiences.

As for me, the next such story I shall write will be an imaginary diary, starting in the 1600's with one of my ancestors and being passed down to and added to by the next in line until it reaches me. I won't write this until I have found out as much as I can about my ancestors, how they lived, what their aspirations were and how events around them affected their lives. To do this I may have to use some conjecture and artistic licence but it will paint the picture of the family line in a way that will tie Whitstable, the people, and the events into a thread that would only ever have one outcome, ie me.