Gerard was recommended to me by a bunch of friends who had already started an involvement in Family Tree research. I had always been interested in checking out the origins of my family name and its roots. My dad told me that we were descended from an Olde English heritage but no-one in our family had ever checked out dad's claims. Sadly, my father passed away in 2000, so our history remained a mystery.
I am very proud of my Liverpudlian upbringing but there seemed to be next to nothing on record, in family circles at least, about how my ancestral family arrived in the city of Liverpool. Recent cultural events grabbed my attention and made me want to investigate my home city’s history and development in parallel with my family's history. Once I had got the genealogy bug, I wanted to know where my family came from (before Liverpool) and what brought them to Liverpool.
Gerard's input astounded me, and I can’t praise him enough. He took the names of my paternal grandparents and my mother gave him a few other names to investigate. Most of these extra names were unknown to me as they seemingly died before I was born. Gerard’s first reply told us that he could identify my great-grandparents ….. with records of their marriage, and birth certificates for their children, and a distinct possibility that he could trace the generation before them. We were hooked, but happily so, because no payment transactions took place until we understood exactly what we were buying into.
I gladly asked Gerard to continue his ancestry research to find out how my family came to reside in Liverpool. His results were amazing. I now know because of Gerard’s advisory updates that my ancestor William (GGGF) moved to Liverpool from a small village in England’s Lake District. We also know now that he ended up in Liverpool after a short stay in Manchester.
Gerard expanded the basic history of William’s move to Liverpool by telling me all about his employers and residence in Liverpool in the 19th century. He worked at the world’s first ever department store. It’s still in existence as part of Marks & Spencer in the centre of Liverpool.
The next part of Gerard’s research was unexpected, but it confirmed my father’s recollection of the history of our family name. Gerard focussed his attention on small villages in Westmorland, a former county of northern England. Incredibly, church records allowed him to construct an accurate ancestral family tree spanning twelve generations of my family. My oldest identified ancestor is James born in 1554. Wow!
Later on, Gerard’s interest in my ancient family’s history produced an invaluable bonus which proved earlier findings to be correct ….. a Will dated 1742. I can’t thank Irish Ancestry Research enough. You brought my family history to life!
