Hello

Welcome to Findtree! I am Dr Sarah Halton, a professional genealogist and historian providing family histories, house histories, microhistories, name and place studies and interesting snippets of all kinds.

I have always been interested in history. No one was surprised when I studied it at University, except perhaps me: I thought I might want to be a lawyer, specialising in wills & probate, before I applied. Whilst studying, I got an excellent grounding in general history and was able to nudge my study choices firmly towards the Early Medieval period. In my final year, I took a course on the Icelandic Sagas, with Professor Chris Wickham, and discovered quite by accident that best and most effective way to understand how and why people act as they do is to map their family and social relationships. I prepared for the final exam by making annotated family trees, and aced it. My path through history was set.

Since then, all my historical study has been built around understanding groups in particular locations, or social spaces, or families and society. My doctoral thesis examined family structure and female agency, as visible through donation of land to the Abbey at Cluny, for religious, social and political purposes. My own family tree research started in earnest at about the same time, although I had been dabbling in it since my early teens. Wills and probate turned out to be a very important part of that, so my instincts were right, if misfocussed, when I was at school.

Findtree started in 2007 as a way of sharing my research and lending my skills to other people. It became very apparent that when I mentioned to people that I was a professional genealogist and historian, the questions came thick and fast. People love to find out where they came from and how family actions and attitudes from the past shaped their present.