I HAVE been musing on the somewhat peculiar nature of our hobby. A few years ago I had a conversation with a cousin of mine who is a psychiatrist. He was intrigued when I told him I was into genealogy and asked what I did, exactly. I told him that a genealogist was someone who......... (a) Spends most of their waking hours with an obsessive interest in dead people. (b) Has a disturbing habit of sticking a tape recorder into the faces of elderly relatives and badgering them for hours with silly questions. (c) Will go to a funeral and announce that they aren‘t remotely interested in the deceased‘s money or the family silver but would kill for a cardboard box full of old photographs. (d) Will spend hours in a cramped record office sandwiched between two people, one with a hacking cough and the other who has had several pints of beer and a curry for lunch and is making the appropriate emissions. (e) Frets and mourns inconsolably because they can‘t discover where their great-grandfather was born. (f) Spends hours on end hunched over a computer endlessly inputting bizarre information and talking to people on the other side of the Atlantic with a similar obsession; (g) Is willing to travel many miles in the pouring rain to haunt derelict graveyards and write down inscriptions from crumbling old stones. After considering this information gravely, my cousin made the observation that if any patient came to him with the above symptoms he would beyond doubt class them as mentally certifiable and have them instantly committed to somewhere where they wouldn‘t be a danger to the public at large! Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society (Guild of One-Name Studies, FedFHS) STOCKDILL PREST YELLOW BOLTON WORSNOP GIBSON MIDGLEY BRACEWELL SHACKLETON BRADLEY MOODY in Yorkshire North & West Ridings MEAD YOUNG in Somerset, Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Web page of the Stockdill Family History Society:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)