Education and History

University and Abiding Passion for History and Genealogy

I was educated at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand where I gained my degree in History. Which had by then become an abiding passion. After graduating and having successfully traced my own ancestry, I set up as a genealogist while still in New Zealand.
By this time I had traced many of my ancestors back to the beginning of parish registers including all 32 of my 3X Great Grandparents, all 16 of my 2x Great Grandparents and of course my Great Grandparents and Grandparents, whom I knew already any way.
To successfully find a full set of 3x Great Grandparents may sound like nothing much, but is very difficult to do in most cases. I was fortunate indeed and I still appreciate just how lucky I was with my ancestors.

Travel, Research and Photography

After many years of working as a Genealogist in New Zealand I could wait no longer and set off to visit the places in Britain my ancestors came from. Part of the time I stayed with relatives whom I had found through genealogy, but never met before. They are fantastic people and are now like close family to me. I spent three weeks in England travelling with one of my new found cousins most of the time. Then I moved up into Scotland and spent another three weeks there.
This was meant to be my once in a lifetime pilgrimage but as life is inclined to change 'the best laid plans' after my two months and a tearful goodbye to my new found family I boarded the plane for my homeward journey. Little did I know that I was about to meet my future husband sitting in the next seat. But that is another story. The upshot of this unexpected meeting was that I was married six months later in New Zealand and moved to Hertfordshire to live. I lived there for eight and a half years then life being what it is my husband and I parted and I returned to New Zealand where I lived for the next eighteen months. I bought an Italian Cafe named the Pan Italia and ran the business for over a year but could not settle and sold it to return to Britain. I am now living in Edinburgh where I hope to remain for the forseeable future. Genealogy and my passion for it have brought me all the best things in my life and my greatest wish is to give back some of what I have been given by it so I continue to do research and photography.

email: Gene Foebes-Hood