Posted by Ken Waldron on June 9, 2020, 1:51 am, in reply to "Thanks .."
Cheers. I spent many years studying early British history provoked by the simple fact that I had an unanswered question: I merely wanted to know what the name of the region I was born actually meant.
-It seemed an innocent and easily answered thing but nobody seemed to really know. So I set off with a spirit of enquiry and within a few years: some of it spent annoying a very clever Welsh speaking English friend for aid we had found the sources & solved the riddle.
Alas or indeed luckily...for our sins we both got sucked in and spent many years digging into the whole pre- to post Roman period and on to questions of how Scotland became...how Wales became...how England became...and on to Ireland: they all still hold fascinating questions.
In those pre-internet days luckily my little pit village had a wee Carnegie library...and some of the sources I had to dig up had only one lending copy in the whole country. Thus quite often the library who had been sent the book by the British library had been instructed that it wasn't to leave the premises...oh the fun I had pretending to go out for a quick smoke...leaving my belongings and smuggling books out under my coat past the desk of the stern matronly librarian who ran the show... shooting out to another friends place round the corner where I could rattle copies of the crucial stuff out on his photocopier before running back to smuggle the book back in to the library in reverse.
Internet generation?- Lucky buggers..don't know they're born...
Aside from the internet, the development in genetics are also beginning to get to grips with some of the more forensic questions in a completely unforeseen way.
-Here's a nice set of maps that show some of the changes and developments and touching on that: