The policy of the Scadding Genealogy page is to:

 Try to be as truthful as possible.

 To try to achieve complete coverage of all Scaddings and variants of the name, even though that may be impossible to achieve in practice.

 To give practical help to all those interested in genealogy and the Scad* families in particular.

To this end I have added to the pages available to provide links to other pages and a page for individuals of interest, as well as the downloads, helpers and lookup pages we have always featured. I hope that the pages are easy to use, and would be very pleased to hear of any comments, good or bad.

Truth is fleeting. Without being too philosophical, I have found that the harder you look, the less you find. Specifically, while you would have thought that it would have been simple to just look up government and parish records to gain a picture of our ancestors, there is a problem of connections. Each record deals with one event, for example a birth, death or marriage. Few refer to any other event, such as the birth of someone who has died. It is therefore difficult to connect the main events of someone's life with absolute certainty. If there are several of the same name at the same time in the same parish then events can become confused. It is even worse when, as often happens, an individual moves around during his life. Given this central difficulty, I do not think that this type of study can be totally truthful - it is just a hypothesis. As more research is done, the hypothesis will come to resemble the truth more and more closely, but will never become truth because we can never know everything about any one life.

Why do we do all this? I am told that there has been a huge increase in the popularity of genealogy over the past few years, especially since the Internet has facilitated study. Why do people bother? While we are all curious about our own origins, that curiosity has been hugely increased by the changes in life over the last century or so. We cannot now go to the local church and look at the memorials of our ancestors or inspect the records in the parish chest. Our relations are far-flung. Our professions too often demand the uprooting of the family from one place, before those roots have had much time to grow. On the other hand, we are among the most educated generations ever and we can enjoy research for its own sake. In this very multicultural world there is interest in finding what our own roots are: just how English are we? All this adds up to a compulsive desire to research and to know about the past, and our past in particular. My own is not the only family, I am sure, that has shown such a great interest in genealogy as a family activity, the focus of interest on many family occasions and an interest to be pursued in common. I hope that we can all join in and that this page will help everyone to contribute.