When my father Marcus Alwyn Pattern retired in 1998, he spent several years researching the Pattern family tree and also that of his wife, Olive (née Petch). Much of the research was carried out online and he managed to make contact with distant cousins in Canada and Australia, as well as spending hours on the phone to his surviving siblings.
In visits home, dad would occasionally chat about his latest findings and he shared his Ancestry tree with me (which contains 99 individuals).
Around the late 2010s, we began to notice that his cognitive skills were starting to decline but assumed it was probably “just old age”. However, the decline became more apparent during the early 2020s and what would eventually be diagnosed as dementia slowly robbed him of his ability to communicate. He spent his 90th birthday in May 2023 at home in Eastburn (between Keighley and Skipton) and passed away peacefully at a nearby nursing home on 3 July.
It wasn’t until several months later, whilst sorting through photo albums in a wardrobe, that we found one that dad had repurposed into a family history album. As far as we know, he never showed this to anyone and his reasons for squirreling it away in the wardrobe remain unknown.
The album has been scanned and transcribed in two separate parts:
I’ve been a web developer since the mid-1990s and have worked as a library IT manager at the University of Huddersfield since 2004. My own interest in local and history and genealogy didn’t surface until the 2010s when I was in my early forties. Ultimately it led me to setting up the local history site Huddersfield Exposed in 2015.
Following dad’s death and the discovery of the family album, I also gained access to his Ancestry account which allowed me to export the family tree research. Since then, I’ve added over 750 ancestors to the tree and this is available on Ancestry UK to anyone with an account:
ancestry.co.uk/family-tree/tree/192487056/
The export of the tree also got me thinking about ways of making it publicly available and this WordPress site is the end result.
For those of you interested in the technical details, the tree is exported from Ancestry as a GEDCOM1 file which is then uploaded as a media file into WordPress. The file is then processed and converted to JSON format, which is used to automatically populate the biographical details for the pages about individuals. The individual pages can be edited to add photographs and research notes, and also allow for comments to be added.