This interesting article came up on my local OZ list. Anyone can participate on this list if you consider yourself to be an "Old Fogie." The url is at the bottom of this article, feel free to subscribe if you wish. It costs nothing, the subjects are wide & varying. With typical Aussie humour. Seamus ...(Tout รก fait Chevalier ) All mail scanned with Norton's 2004 updated Why shaking the family tree can be bad for your health By Elizabeth Day (Filed: 17/04/2005) Genealogists want psychotherapy to be made available for people who stumble across unpleasant discoveries while researching their family history. The Society of Genealogists is one of several organisations concerned that amateur historians are not sufficiently prepared for the secrets they might uncover in their family records, and could need counselling to help them through the emotional process. Else Churchill, a genealogy officer at the society, said: "People can be dealing with many serious things - from discovering your ancestor was a rapist who was deported to Australia to finding out you are adopted. Burying secrets causes problems and you have to be incredibly sensitive when dealing with such issues. "Having trained counsellors on hand could help. My job as a genealogist ends when I have put the whats and the whos together, but there needs to be a continued support." Many of Britain's four million amateur genealogists will end up discovering illegitimacy, bigamy, adoption and previously unknown relatives in the course of their research. Diane Mattinson, 48, an office manager from Bicester, Oxfordshire, discovered that her great-grandfather, James Phillips, had never married her great-grandmother, Elizabeth. "It was a bombshell," said Mrs Mattinson. "I had my family to support me and to talk things over with, but some people don't have that. For people who find out they have half-brothers or sisters or things like that, counselling would be a good idea." Another amateur genealogist, who did not wish to be named, found that when she inspected a copy of her birth certificate at the Public Records Office, the man she believed to be her uncle was, in fact, her father. He was now dead, she said, but "my cousins are actually my half-brothers and sisters. It was a huge shock. I would have welcomed counselling". Sally Angel, the media and strategy director of Firebird, an archive research agency, said that she was now training as a psychotherapist in order to help clients to deal with such discoveries. "Family history is not just about gathering information. Underneath the research, there's a bunch of moral, ethical, social and psychological issues related to how you see yourself." Family history has become an increasingly popular pursuit in recent years, aided by the publication of census returns on the internet and the proliferation of television genealogy programmes. BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are?, which traced the family trees of famous people including the actress Amanda Redman and the naturalist Bill Oddie. Miss Redman was shown in tears after discovering that her uncle was illegitimate, while Mr Oddie's research revealed a sister who died soon after birth. There are those, however, who might be disappointed if they fail to find some dark secret. Last year, a survey conducted by 1837online.com, a genealogical website, found that 10 per cent of amateur historians hope to unearth a family skeleton _______________________________________________ Fogies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.iinet.net.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fogies X