She used to walk me up to Hastings Cemetery regularly and show me the graves of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Although these places are still mainly in the south of England, they felt more distant to the twelve-year-old me! Dengate was my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and she was one of those gems we genealogists happen upon rarely, who kept all kinds of family memorabilia going back several generations and who wrote on the backs of her many photographs.

Conversely, my other family lines came from slightly further afield (London, Norfolk, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Devon, Cornwall). I became interested in this side of the family around the age of twelve, I think partly because the locations where they had lived were so familiar to me. I grew up in Hastings, on the south coast of England (famed for the battle in 1066), where several generations of the Dengate branch of my family had lived, their having moved there from the surrounding countryside in Sussex and Kent in the late 1870s. Tell us about your upbringing and how you became interested in genealogy

The fact that I can combine the two things as my career is a dream come true there’s no job that I would rather do! What came first…a love of writing or a love of genealogy?Īlthough English was always my favourite subject at school, I would have to say that the love of genealogy came first. Nathan will be speaking on the first day of the NERGC conference, April 1. I was thrilled to be given the opportunity by NERGC to interview him by email for this year’s conference. Nathan’s reputation in the genealogy world is that of a talented, personable, and humble man who loves genealogy and loves writing. Seconds later, several fans came by to meet him, so we retreated to give him time to give them his full attention. We came to Nathan’s RootsTech booth and all introduced ourselves to him. When I say I “met” Nathan, it would be more accurate to say I participated in a group hello with four other genie friends as we walked the RootsTech Expo Hall that year. Nathan had tapped into a genealogy niche that no one else I had ever met before had. The main character of the series was beloved Morton Farrier. At that time, he had several books released of a series of non-fiction novels, fondly pegged as the Forensic Genealogist series.

In the genealogy realm, he was newly known for being a genealogical crime mystery author. Nathan is a British internationally acclaimed author. Nathan had broken into the genealogy world in a wonderful way I had never seen before. But meeting Nathan Dylan Goodwin at RootsTech a few years ago felt like an entirely different thing. I’ve met a lot of fellow genealogists during my 30 years of researching my family history. It might be Civil War history, Eastern European ancestry, or even DNA.

Nathan Dylan Goodwin, Author, and GenealogistĮvery genealogist has some kind of specialty.

Hiding the Past by Nathan Dylan Goodwin