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I began as an inquisitive teenager back in 1975 trying to piece together the relationships of the people that my grandmother talked about. I went back several generations fairly quickly with the help of Great-Aunts and Uncles and then second cousins who had kept up an interest in corresponding with the various branches of the family. I now have a large family tree and have made contact with cousins in many countries and it just keeps growing. Unfortunately we are all now stuck at the same point, trying to find the origins of John and Alice who seem to have been "beamed in" to Tenterden in Kent in the year 1679. Despite all of my efforts I still cannot find anything about them before that date. Over the years I have tried to crack the problem by collecting Ballard information from the Kent parishes and it grew from there into Sussex, Surrey, London and all points north, south and west! In the process I came across the Ballard material in the Herald's Visitation and decided to try to resolve some of the conflicts that there appeared to be in the information within them. Little did I realise just how much time and effort I would end up investing in the Ballards of Horton, Wadhurst, Wymeswold and Southwell. On several occasions in the past I have not touched my family history stuff for long periods, either because of frustration in lack of progress or because other pressures didn't leave me with the time. However, I always seem to be drawn back to it and the various families that I have been working on to try to uncover a little more detail about some of the characters that I have discovered. So far John and Alice remain a mystery but every now and then I discover more detail about their children or grandchildren and one day I shall find that elusive piece of information that will unlock the next generation or two back from them. Serendipity is a big friend to the family historian and there have been many occasions on which I have discovered important clues about a family whilst searching for something completely different. So in the meantime I go on building my database of well over 100 discrete Ballard lines and one day ....
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