Normally in genealogy you go looking for information on the people you are interested in. The limitation is that you can only ever hope to find things that are somehow directly connected with those names.
In reverse genealogy, you have some information, and then you set about the fairly simple task of finding the people descended from those concerned, and then you wave it in their faces.
Here's an example. Francis Downes Ommanney wrote a detailed description of his school days at a boarding school in Folkestone in his autobiography The House in the Park. I found my way to this book rather easily, because it happened to be my (distant) relative who wrote it, and whose name pops up in the library catalogue.
But if you're descended from Ommanney's schoolmate Poulton Major you're very unlikely to find this material. Ommanney is hardly a household name, after all. Poulton Major and the account in the book cannot be linked by even the most painstaking genealogist, partly because the book is never read, but mostly because Poulton Major is a pseudonym.
How do I know? Because they were at school when the 1911 census trundled past.
Here's the census of 2nd April 1911, with the seven year old Francis Ommanney, his brother, and the other boys:
It must have been Francis's first term, because his brother Owen is there, and Francis writes in the book 'Both my brother and his friend left at the end of my first term'.
What about those pseudonyms? Well, unfortunately the boys are generally anonymous, but the teachers appear in detail. The hierarchy of cook and matron and Headmaster is dutifully preserved in the census, and enables us to compile the following list:
CENSUS BOOK
George Nettleton (son of HTN), born c.1871: 'Edward Shuttleworth'
[His sister seems to have been absent for the 1911 census]
Caroline Wood (nurse - school matron), born c. 1875: 'Miss Watson'
Eliza King (cook), born c. 1877
Louisa Bird (housemaid), born c. 1883
Herbert Jeffery (teacher), born c.1876: 'Mr Simpson'
There is just enough similarity between the pseudonyms and the real names (Nettleton/Shuttleworth; Wood/Watson) to reassure me I'm on the right track.
The pupils (and approximate birth year, based on ages) are:
Cecil Lillie (1898)
Guy Reeves (1902)
Ernest Ashworth (1900)
Joseph Badeley (1899)
Owen Ommanney (1899)
Basil Colchester (1900)
William Ashworth (1899)
Robert Ferrier (1900)
Harold Porter (Pater?) (1900)
Charles Porter/Pater (1901)
Ronald Selby (1900)
Llewellyn Jones (1901)
Raymond Wickham (1902)
Ronald Pitt (1902)
Francis Ommanney (1903)
It's tempting to hypothesise that Harold Porter might be the Poulton Major of the book, as he appears to have had a younger brother, and he is of an age with Owen Ommanney, and there is a similarity in the surname along the lines of those used for the adults. But perhaps that's a step too far.
FDO mentions in the book that there were about 40 pupils; it is not clear why there are only fifteen on the census sheet. (The next page of the census begins with a girls' school, but there is no indication in the book that it was a mixed school, so perhaps that was another institution down the road).
The Head's wife, Julia Browne ('old Mrs Shuttleworth'), does not appear in the census because she died in November 1910. This is recounted in FDO's book, as he met her on an earlier visit to the school.
The text of the school chapters are in the attached PDF. If you're taken with it, the whole book can be found in online bookshops for a song.
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