Originally posted by zkarj All our family history has been researched the old fashioned way. In the mid to late 80s by a cousin of my father (from which I was able to tie up to Kiwizinho's info) and then latterly by my parents. They found a tenuous line on Dad's side as far back as ~1200AD.
The most fascinating part is one ancestor many hundreds of years back was lord of a manor, on which there was a fresh water spring and he used to bottle and sell it. Not that many years ago, my parents visited this manor and bought some of the bottled spring water. We had it with Christmas dinner that year.
When I lived in Cape Town, that had the advantage of being both the repository of the Cape Province Archives and also the Archives of the Duch Reformed Church and several other churches in South Africa. I spent much time in the archives and could therefore access a lot of records which are hard to access anywhere else in the country.
My aunt started the family tree but because she lived in Port Elizabeth it made archives research pretty much impossible in pre-Internet days.
You'd look up records on microfiche and then search further links by asking the archivists to bring out the paper records which were all in great big leather bound books. Those days you could still handle the actual 300 year old and older documents. Those days are gone.