Margaret Smith has become unstuck
in time. Finding out about her ancestors seemed fun at first, a hobby to while
away the time now that the kids had moved out and started families of her own.
A chance to unearth some long lost family scandal, perhaps to discover an
illustrious ancestor, and to finally work out how exactly she was related to
all the half remembered aunts of her childhood.
An advert on ITV 7 had pointed
her in the direction of Ancestor-Discoverer dot com, a site which promised to
make easy all the hard work of searching through archives and records and take
her directly to the business of nosing around the private business of her forebears.
She made a cup of tea and got her laptop ready, entering all the information
the site needed: her name, her date of birth, the details of any known
relatives. She then pressed enter and set the machine whirring away.
