Back & Forth

With apologies to Blackadder!  Please don't sue me for intellectual property crime!
As a freelance historical researcher and archivist, I go "back" in time a lot of the time.  "Back and forth"... "hither and yon"... to archives all over England as well as online. Time travelling in my head and through the dates on the document order forms. Sometimes I make a great leap forward and I and my client will be happy. Sometimes all movement is backwards. In a crazy, corkscrewy kind of way, the past is actually unpredictable. You simply don't know what you are going to discover until you begin.
Geoffrey Elton wrote in 1967: "The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation."
This may be the motivation of some historians and "nostalgians", but how bleak it looks in all directions. My professional experience is that both the past and the future are unknown, but not unknowable. The future will come whether you look for it or not; it will affect you. The past has affected and will continue to affect us all. If you try to understand it you might understand the present and future better, deal with them better.
Deciphering the detail can be exciting. It is unpredictable. People enjoy TV programmes about the pursuit of the past. Pursuing the Past is what I do. Without breaking confidences, I plan to share some of the discoveries I make through this blog.
If you have mysteries of history you want to solve, take a look at my website and see if you think I might be able to help you.