My name is Karen Hapgood. In my day job I work in science and engineering, but recently I have become really interested in documenting my family history. My Mum has heaps of information on the HAPGOOD and WADDELL families, and the NEWTON and JACKSON families, and I have a few photos and information from her extensive collection. More recently I signed up to ancestry and a whole world of information opened up – and I realised that the small amount I do know is actually quite a lot!

Why do this?

Paid geneology sites are wonderful (and addictive!), but there is a lot more information around that isn’t on these sites, and the interesting thing about genealogy is not the facts and figures of peoples births, deaths and marriages, but their stories – where they lived, what they did for a living, why they moved, their passions and the tragedies – really bring the past to life.

The posts about each person or family will be posted in a semi-random order, based on who I think has the most interesting and semi-complete story at the time. Over time, using tagging of every persons name, a more coherent story should appear. I am particularly interested in trying to expand on the history of the women in the family, who are often quite invisible behind their married names of “Mrs Thomas Hapgood”, but who were every bit as strong and adventurous as their husbands.

The other aim of the blog is to share family photos and help compile them all. I will use as many photos as I can – and I have tried to give credit and attribution wherever this is known. If you have photos of related people and are happy to share (recognising that anything posted on a blog will be saved and copied by other people), please get in touch!

If you are a family member and want to save a copy of a photo, please go ahead – it’s a family collection and you are a family member! Sharing photos and info is part of the point of this blog. You can use for other non-commercial purposes but please link back to the blog post it came from (I.e. acknowledge your sources!)

Please also read my blog disclaimer….

Want to get in touch with me? Email me at karenhapgood [at) gmail.com