Roots

My advice to you is don't join a genealogy website unless you have a lot of free time, and someone else to bring you food. I joined ancestry last Sunday night have done barely anything else since then. I'm just about done now, at least as far as I can go. Things got rather intense on Monday and Tuesday. I had lunch around 3 and dinner (noodles, omelettes) around 9pm, and went to bed at 1. It's entirely addictive and of course never finished. I took most of my family lines back to at least the late 1700s using ancestry and familysearch.org (thanks Mormons!); it helps that they are all from the south-west of England, and mostly from the same towns and villages for generation after generation. I have so much information in my head now that it's hard to snap back into real life. I can even google map the street addresses and see where they lived (when it's still a house and not a shopping mall). In general, life was very hard for my ancestors. They were all poor and had many children, some of whom inevitably died young. My Welsh grandfather's father was working down a mine in the Welsh valleys at 14 and consequently died of TB and silicosis when my grandfather was only ten. He says he remembers them carrying the coffin through the village. One great great great grandfather ended his life living in a workhouse in Bristol. The same workhouse union built a new building shortly after he died which later became a hospital, and is where I was born. Really it's a wonder I'm here at all. But they were always surrounded with family, of many generations. I envy that, and I can imagine happy times.
After several centuries of family in Bristol (paternal side) and Devon/Wales (maternal), I'm glad to have been born in Bristol, and to have lived a year in Devon. I think if I go back to England, I'd like to live over that way. It's most definitely where my roots are.