Jessica lives in Oxfordshire and has been researching her own family for many years, as well as teaching others how to do it and helping them share their family stories. She loves to solve mysteries and doesn’t give up – sometimes one just has to be patient and then all the pieces of the puzzle come together. 

 Jessica’s father’s mother, Rose, used to tell her stories about her family when Jessica was a child visiting her in Johannesburg, and she drew family trees showing all her cousins on rolls of computer print-out paper.

​Rose gave Jessica her parents’ wedding invitation from 1899 and a wonderful photo of them taken in the same year. On her mother’s side, she was lucky enough to inherit a treasure trove of letters written by her parents and other family members, and suitcases full of old photos.

​She looked after all the artefacts she was given as well as she could as a child, by sticky-taping documents into notebooks (do not do this yourself!) and using photograph albums that left horrible sticky marks on everything. What she didn’t do, of course, was to record her grandparents and other relatives telling her about their lives, or to ask them those questions that would have been so useful if she had only known what to ask. Luckily, some of them left their own stories behind.

 When the Internet came along, a cousin introduced her to a wonderful website where you can build your family tree and share it with your relatives. From that moment on, she became seriously addicted. She set up her own site in 2008, signed up for subscriptions to well-known genealogy websites, and spent every waking moment checking the details she thought she knew, excitedly emailing family members with each new discovery, and building up her tree.

Then she was offered the chance to teach a genealogy course for beginners, and she realized that she had a lot of experience that she could share, including how not to do it! She decided to undertake a professional qualification, and completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies (Strathclyde University) in 2015, and their Postgraduate Diploma in 2016.

​She loves showing people how to research their own family trees but also enjoys the fact that so many people ask her to do the research for them, and it’s a privilege to share the excitement of genealogical discoveries with them.

​Her voluntary roles include acting as an advisor for the Oxfordshire Family History Society, and editing Shemot, the journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.

​She is now busy introducing her own grandchildren to their ancestors.