Which genealogy challenge has given you the best sense of accomplishment? What was the research problem you had to hurdle? What steps did you take that led to success? Do you have any words of encouragement for others who are facing their own genealogy challenges?

There was a time when my family, and I, thought we were the only KELLAND's in South Africa! There was one other mentioned in the Johannesburg phone book, but we had no idea where he had come from and didn't really want to know! I married into the KELLAND family so there's my husband and myself and my three children, (one daughter now married so left the KELLAND name!), my husband's brother and his wife (x2 still with the KELLAND name) and their children (x 3). My father-in-law died in 1979 and my mother-in-law in 2002, and we thought we could safely say we were the only KELLAND's in South Africa!

But where did we start? In about 2005 I determined to find out and simply googled the name KELLAND. This was while I was still in South Africa and working on an expensive dial-up system - paying for every precious second on our our phone bill. It was then I discovered that there's an area in Randburg, Johannesburg, called KELLAND! Which of course made my research extremely difficult! (And I still haven't found out how that area got our name!) For long nights I'd skim through the Google intros and then note down which page I'd got to to start the next night.

My eureka came when I found a FRANCIS ARTHUR KELLAND and the city of East London (SA)in one Google hit. Why did this stand out? Because my father-in-law's name was PHILIP EDMOND FRANCIS KELLAND, my husband's middle name is ARTHUR, and the KELLAND's have a history in East London! Coincidence?

Turned out that this FRANCIS ARTHUR KELLAND, (thanks to Keith Tankard) was the KELLAND Great Grandfather! (see earlier blog). From their I traced him to Dartmouth and through the KELLAND One Name Society run by Martin Kelland in the UK, discovered a fully grown orchard - they sent me family trees showing my branch of the family going back to 1567.

So the lessons are: Research may mean trawling through Google if you've only got the internet or are living in a different country (although my other names, STREET, ASH are not so easy to do that with!)and be very rewarding. But finding all that information already written up, discovered, DOB, DOM, DOD's already written in was quite a let down. Don't get me wrong, it was great to find them all the way back to the 1500's, but I didn't have the satisfaction of having found it out myself! So what do I do now?

Well then I trawled the newspapers (as far as I could FREE!) and found out stories of a Trinity Pilot Cousin in Dartmouth who almost drowned, presumed missing, and who washed up on the beach - alive! A 2x Great Uncle who got his chief mate's rank aged 25, and I also discovered that there's a number of people trying to find a certain French Army Officer called ANTHONY DEMARCHYE - he was the father of our 3xgreat grandmother. There's a few of us related to him and we all have the marriage certificate on which he's listed as the father - but nothing else appears to be available!

So some satisfaction and some frustration with some expectation! All in a day\'s research!