The Demon Drink

 

 

In my last post, I referred to family issues affecting my writing.  One of the issues is alcoholism.  One of my husband's adopted brothers is sinking ever further into addiction and is simply unable to see that he needs help.  He believes he controls the alcohol, not the other way around.  His life, nearly fifty years of it, has not gone at all as he would have hoped and he has battled other addictions in the past.  However, the death of my father-in-law this year has tipped the balance and this is the worst that we have seen him - from any substance or liquid.

 

One of the issues which I wonder about, in my pondering, genealogy-obsessed way, is what has driven him to this point.  The circumstances of his adoption were not handled well by my parents-in-law.  A very old fashioned approach was taken to how the two brothers were told of their adoptions (they are not related to each other) and how the family then integrated when my husband, the only natural child, arrived.  My brother-in-law has always maintained no interest in seeking out his birth parents.  However, on Long Lost Family last week, one of the stories concerned a man who had sunk into addiction because of the rejection he felt from a combination of being adopted and of his adoptive parents then divorcing.  He described very eloquently how he had reacted and I believe my brother in law may have very similar issues.

 

Alcoholism can run in families.  I do not think a trace of the birth parents in this case would necessarily reveal alcohol related problems though.  I believe it is self esteem and family issues which have driven the constant need for a crutch in his life.

 

Now, though, we appear to have passed a point where counselling alone would help him to abandon his crutch.  Drying out is the only option but to do that, you have to recognise the existence of the problem and we are at a loss with how to make this happen.

 

I know, sadly, from having also witnessed a couple of acquaintances slip into alcoholism over the past ten years, that at a certain point, even organ failure and imminent death do not persuade someone that drink is not the answer.  They will lie, yellowing, on a hospital bed and ask you to slip them a drink.

 

Many of us like a drink, don't get me wrong.  This is drinking on a whole different scale.  Wake up, drink whiskey; once you are no longer capable of holding down a job you then drink on and off all day.  You lapse into sleep, wake up hungover at whatever time then start drinking again.  Continue ad infinitum...  Paula Hawkins' thriller The Girl On The Train describes the cycle very well.

 

We are lucky to have more knowledge than our ancestors on how to deal with these issues.  Despite government cuts, there are many services trying to help, to cope.  The Georgians, the Victorians or whoever did not have these insights.  However, at the end of the day in whatever age of history you are looking at, the key remains the same.  Admitting the problem and wanting to do something about it.  I hope my brother-in-law can find that key soon.

 

Who Do We Think We Look Like?

Last night, my husband and I watched This World on BBC2, an episode called "Ireland's Lost Babies", presented by Martin Sixsmith.  [Sixsmith was the author of Philomena, the 2013 film starring Judi Dench about an Irish woman searching for her lost son.]

 

As it happens, my husband has two elder brothers who are Irish and adopted but now is not the time for that long and convoluted story.  Suffice to say that I was surprised to come downstairs from child bedtime duties and find my husband watching the programme.

 

What struck me throughout - apart from, of course, the awfulness of what the Catholic Church did in effectively selling the babies of unmarried mothers - was the desire of the "children" to find roots.  To find who they looked like and whose mannerisms they had inherited.

 

This is a striking theme throughout Long Lost Family on ITV too.  Humans, it seems, have a great desire to belong to other humans in a recognisable way.

 

Friends and acquaintances who were adopted have often said that a real driving force to find their roots has come upon them when they have their own children.  There comes, at its best, a curiosity but at its worst, a desperation - to make sense of your history and your personality and characteristics when you are confronted with your own flesh and blood.  No matter how wonderful your childhood has been within your adopted family, many adoptees feel a sense of difference - whether that be looks or temperament or both.  One of my brother in laws recently said that he had thought for the first time of where his true roots lay.  My in-laws are elderly and he himself was ill and it occurred to him that he had no real medical history in terms of predilection for heart problems, dementia or whatever.

 

On last night's programme and indeed on the recent Long Lost Family episodes, I don't know whether it is just me but when the families finally meet or when, as last night, you see photos of the parents next to the children, it suddenly seems obvious that they are connected.  Last night, Martin Sixsmith was talking to "children", now in their fifties and sixties, who had been adopted from Ireland to America.  Their upbringings were poles apart from where they came from - not always happily either.  Yet upon seeing them in proximity to images of their lost parents, the resemblances were remarkable.

 

My grandad had a real thing about people trying to say whom babies resembled.  He used to say quite firmly that "babies look like themselves".  He was right of course.  Humans do not look identical - unless, like the Harry Potter characters above, they are identical twins!

 

But people, it seems, have a need to look like someone or be like someone.  Whilst we are living with our families, maybe we just don't see the similarities because it is all to close and if we are lucky, very comfortable.  But it must be very different if you grow up without anyone to "take after".  Adoptees who only found out late in life that they were adopted often refer to a feeling of not belonging - an underlying feeling of which they could not make sense, even when they had what could only be described as happy childhoods.

 

In a way, you can see what you want to see, I suppose.  My son looks very like my husband, according to many people.  My mother, though, often sees characteristics which remind her of my brother at the same age.  I, on the other hand, see just my son.  He is, as my granddad would say, "himself".  Just as all of those people searching for lost relatives are, in the end, THEM selves.  However, I am coming to the conclusion that there is an inherent comfort for many humans in having a sense of belonging to the people around them.  I think I need that Tardis again - I need to check out cavemen and see where this comes from...

 

Don't Give Up

A break for the arrival of our puppy and now I am sneaking a post while she is snoozing.  Honestly, it is like being back in the baby days with my two.  No idea what we are doing, trying to understand what the creature wants, up half the night.  Can't say we weren't warned though and to be fair, Bonnie (for that is said puppy's name) has actually been very good.  Just house bound now while we wait for her to get vaccinated against all of the many dog diseases that I had never heard of before.  But, as usual, I digress....

I am a big fan of the ITV programme Long Lost Family and have been thinking about the lessons that it gives to those of us starting out in genealogy.  For those who have not seen the programme, they follow two stories per episode.   In general they are connected with adoption cases - one story might be a parent searching and the other, an adopted child wanting to trace their birth parents.  The stories themselves are not so straightforward obviously but you get the concept of the programme.

I was a little wary of the fact that Davina McCall is one of the presenters when I first watched it.  Pre children, I watched far too many early series of the original Big Brother and have it found hard to take Davina "please do not swear" McCall seriously ever since.  However, she seems a lot calmer (thank goodness) these days so please don't let her presence put you off!  For Long Lost Family, she seems to strike the right balance of information and sympathy and not to have the mocking edge that she used for Big Brother interviews.  And the other presenter, Nicky Campbell, is generally to be relied upon as serious plus has apparently been through an adoption search himself.

In "genealogy circles" (do I sound like I know what I am talking about?!), the general term used for points in a family tree that cannot be pushed any further back is "brickwalls".  If you look at the covers of the magazines or Google genealogy, you will see that there are a great many articles/people.organisations offering to help you  "break down those brickwalls".

The Long Lost Family team are masters at breaking down brickwalls.  Lest we get too excited, they have the budget to employ adoption specialists, to fly all over the world and so on, remember.  However, I do think that the programmes offer a lesson in never giving up.  There is the "tugging of the heartstrings" side of bringing anxious people good news and introducing them to each other on camera.  All makes for good television.  (This week, though, was the first time that I can remember them finding out that a father for whom they were looking had died some years ago and they did give this news off camera.)  The good television moments are based on startlingly good research though.  Even Iranian spies have been found this series!

In research terms, I believe the programmes show just what is possible.  Who Do You Think You Are? of course does something similar.  The difference is that WDYTYA uses each celebrity's story to provide us with social history lessons as well as providing the celebrity with personal answers.  Long Lost Family shows what can be achieved with stories much harder to trace due to privacy laws, lack of online data and so on.  Sometimes they even admit that they have trawled social networking sites, looking for clues.  Censuses are embargoed for one hundred years.  The next time that UK census full results will released to the public is 2021 - for the 1921 census.  So researching the movements of people after 1911 is currently more difficult than nineteenth century research in many ways.

It would be interesting to know just how many cases do not make it to our screens of course but in general, I think we can draw the lesson "do not give up" from the episodes which are actually shown.  My father has a second cousin of whom he was vaguely aware.  There had been contact years ago but little or nothing since the death of my grandfather.   After much fruitless searching for anything later than 1950, I searched his last known locality's newspapers online and I did find him.  And he had been done for drink-driving so had made the press...  not an ideal thing to find on the other side of the brickwall but hey, at least I broke it down....