Soon after my father died, I was going through some paperwork and found my great-aunt's will. Great aunt Flo Lamin was my birth grandmother's sister and remained a spinster - my mother's birth mother died when my mother was 2½ and my grandfather remarried 2 years later. Said great aunt, I believe, effectively brought up my mother for a while, probably continuing after grandfather's remarriage, as I am fairly sure that my mother did not initially get on with her stepmother.
Anyway back to the paperwork and in her will, Flo left two thirds of her estate to my mother and one third to someone I had never heard of. This piqued my interest, and I started researching. I couldn't find much available on line at that time, but once the 1911 census was available, some research revealed that Henry Lamin (great great GF - who I remember meeting once as a child - had married Elizabeth Bryan. An immediate brick wall appeared in that the census merely said that she was born in Ireland. A while after that, I went to one of the WDYTYA shows and Find My Past were offering access, so I searched and found that she was born in Balbriggan, but her mother (Isabella Bryan nee Ferguson) was born in Scotland, later narrowed down to Hawick. This was the connection - the Lamins and Bryans came from the Arnold area of Nottngham and were monstly framweork knitters, Hawick was a textile centre and Balbriggan at one point was known as the silk capital of the world. They came back to Arnold and many of them died there.
Further reesearch indicated that Elizabeth Bryan GGGM had given birth to an illegitimate daughter before marrying Henry Lamin. Said daughter was obviously accepted into the family after their marriage and went on to marry Cyril Baker, and they had a son Kenneth - who was the person I had never heard of when I started out. So the bug had bit. One other thing that helped was the fact that I also inherited from my father a book about the family of my great great grandfather on my father's side, self published by a (fairly) distant cousin, which had all been compiled manually (probably before the internet was even thought of!) in which he had researched one line back to North Cadbury, Somerset, in the mid-fifteen hundreds. I take my hat off to these early researchers, we have it somewhat easier now.
We welcome any query on Who When Where. If you have previously posted it on another forum (including the old WDYTYA forum), please state this in your opening post - this will save people redoing the research which has been done before: they can look at it and possibly go further with it.