Hi everyone,
I'll admit that my addiction started after seeing the first series of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' on the BBC.
DH and I started our trees simultanously and it didn't take me long to come across my first and still current brick wall. My mum's grandad (my g-grandad) was 'adopted' in 1877 - long before official adoptions began. There were a few stories in the family about him - centering around the fact that his birth mother was Scottish and that she had been sent down from Scotland to have her baby 'in disgrace'. Also that his birth family had tried to contact him in the early 1930s, via a solicitor as someone had named him in their will.
Sadly good old g-grandad refused any contact with the birth family so that link was lost

.
Added to all that was that he had been adopted by on old couple - in their mid 50s when they adopted him. They were not family members (sadly) as they were definitely paid a wage by the birth family.
I have managed to trace a decendant of the adoptive family, but sadly he knew nothing further about the mysterious adoption...
so, that branch of my tree is stuck firmly in 1877, with a man whose name I know (George Bain) but I have yet to even find a record of his birth, either in England or Scotland.
At the moment I am trying to narrow down all the old ladies with Bain in their name who died in the mid 1930s in Scotland....in the hope that I can find this will in which 'our George' was named as a beneficiary...
Phew, that's it for now.
Like everyone I bet, what started as a hobby has really taken over - to the extent that I am on the point of setting up a research business..
Bye for now,
Hawkeye.