In my eternal quest to explore my family history I have recently been focusing my efforts towards researching my own surname ‘Saunders’.

The thing about genealogy is that is soooo addictive and also a task which is never ending, every generation you go back you instantly double the number of lines to follow (2, 4, 8, 16…), this is before you start going back down the tree finding distant cousins! To try and avoid my research taking over my life I have, for now, put the blinkers on to all but the Saunders family - basically following my paternal line.

Putting this surname limit on has actually helped me get further back than I ever imagined, thus far getting back 7 generations back to 1754. I am now keen to try and find other Saunders’ who may share the same ancestors as me. So far all my Saunders ancestors are from the county of Sussex and this is them:

James Saunders (Me!) ->
Philip George Saunders (My Dad!) ->
Frederick William Saunders (Burgess Hill, 1914) ->
George Charles Saunders (Clayton, 1879) ->
William Saunders (Albourne, 1846) ->
John Saunders (Cowfold, 1809) ->
Charles Saunders (Hurstpierpoint, 1783) ->
John Saunders (Twineham, 1754)

I have not yet come across a hint of any massive family fortune due to me - I think many of my older ancestors were part of the poor class, mostly working as labourers on the Sussex farms or as fishermen, but I am still proud of them as an important part of the country keeping the nation fed.

I now want to see if I can make any links with the wider Saunders family across the world. Rather than searching through dusty, illegible and incomplete old documents I am turning to the tools of a 21st Century genealogist… DNA testing with FTDNA and Social Networking on Facebook.