The branches of my tree
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For 50 years of my life I had no idea that I was anything other than English.  Which County I was from interested me and remember I once asked my Father which County cricket team I should support.  He didn't tell me but I knew it must be Surrey, Kent or Sussex.  There was no way I wasn't the quintessential Englishman.  How wrong could I be !

I started looking at my parents tree about 10 years ago when the TV programme 'Who do you think you are' began and family tree software became available.  When I say "parents", I mean Mum and Dad, my parents.  I always knew I was adopted but wasn't everyone ?  The fact there might be other relations somewhere out there had no real interest to me.  I was very happy and I was pure English.

My Dad's tree included a number of Wareham's emigrating to Australia and New Zealand.  Why did they decide to leave Blighty ?  It also included a Benson who walked out on his wife and children to emigrate to South Africa, to be followed by his son many years later.  Just to spice up the tree, I found a distant Scotsman as well.

Until her sister emigrated to Canada, my Mum's tree was pretty much all English, although they did tend to be Northerners which is almost foreign !

It was after I started researching my birth parents that it became diverse and scarily Scottish.

My birth Mother turned out to be 50% Scottish with a hint of Irish thrown in.  This was added to a few years later when I discovered my birth Father was 100% Scottish.  I was a Highlander, och aye the noo !

From believing myself to be 100% English for the first 50 years of my life, I now found I was mostly Scot with an armful of Irish and only a leg of English. 

As an addendum to this is the death of an important ancestor in Italy, the emigration of some Spence's to America and a tentative link to Ceylon, so you will see my trees are diverse and international.  All of their stories will be told over the next 52 weeks.    

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