Do We Know Who We Are?

Every day there are stories about the interception of or deaths of migrants to Europe.  Whether it be across the Mediterranean or over the Channel or even over the Asian land mass. The stories are so frequent that they have become, for many of us, almost a numbers game.  300 deaths here, 40 deaths there, 200 discovered barely alive in an abandoned crew-less ship and so on and so on.

On  BBC Radio Four's From Our Own Correspondent on 14 February, a reporter went out with one of the EU ships tasked with tracking down the Mediterranean migrants from Africa and the Middle East.  Listening to the report - her own tale of horrific sea sickness, the interview with an officer who could barely speak of some of the horrors that he had seen whilst doing his job, the description of the estimated numbers who try every day to make the crossing - it struck me that it is very easy to lose sight of the personal calamities which drive each and every one of these desperate people.  They are pawns in a numbers game being played by governments and the media but they themselves are making life threatening decisions to migrate rather than to stay in their current situations.  We, in our safe lives, agonise over how to travel with a baby on holiday, for example.  What if you had paid over your life savings in desperation to escape and then found yourself with a baby in a rusty cargo hold with no water, food or fresh air....

Some would have us believe that all migrants are drawn to Europe by the promises of our benefit system.  I am sure that there is a percentage of migrants who are indeed economic migrants, looking to milk the system.  But just how desperate must a person be to risk life, limb and often their families' lives and limbs in order to arrive near penniless in a place where they know no-one?

There is also the fact that for many of us Europeans, it is only a matter of a couple of generations or so back on our family trees before we find our own ancestors taking such risks.  The Italians and Irish to the USA and the UK, the Indians from Uganda to the UK, the partition of India or the Afro Caribbeans to the UK.  Further back, the French Protestants fleeing to England, Jews leaving the Russian pogroms behind. And these are just a few examples.

There are can be very few "Europeans" today who can confidently say "We Know Who We Are" thank you very much.

Let there be dark

I am, it has to be said, a huge fan of Hilary Mantel's books Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  I think I have previously written about going to see the stage plays in fact.

I was dreadfully nervous about the current television adaptation because so often, such things just do not live up to your expectations.  We all form such personal pictures in our heads when we read books that it is virtually impossible to please everyone with television or stage representations.  The best series are, in my humble opinion, the ones which best capture the essence of a book.

This morning, it has been reported that the Wolf Hall film-makers spent over £20,000 on candles.  A lot of the reporting since the series started has focussed on the low level lighting used.  People complaining that they can't see the "action" and so on.

Whilst agreeing that this is a large amount to spend on candles (a (candle)stick of which the Daily Mail will make good use, to beat the BBC!), I absolutely love the atmosphere created by the candles.  Finally, I thought after the first episode, we can see how it must have been.  It really was possible to be lurking in corners and hiding in rooms where people were exchanging confidences.  It was dark!

There is a tendency to look back at history - whether our own family's or the state's - through the view which we have today.  Perpetual light whenever and wherever we want it.  We find it impossible to believe that people could have lived in a world where you gathered around candles every evening or just went to bed.  I lived in a Victorian house until recently.  I never did truly experience it as it's original owners did though.  Even turning off the lights would not give me a Victorian view of the house - there was a dirty great street lamp of the worst orange sort right outside the house!  I was forced to get blackout blinds to get any quality of sleep!

Only a power cut can give any kind of authenticity and even those are often limited to one row of houses these days.  A city is never truly dark - car lights, torches, phones, emergency generators, you name it, we can combat the dark with it.  What are we afraid of?

I have ancestors who drove trains across India, who guarded Napoleon on St Helena, who did actually trade in the City of London in the 1600's, who worked in service at great houses.  They truly lived in  the dark.  The light from a roaring steam engine, firelight, flaming torches, carrying candles for their master to make his way to bed.  That was it.  Blips of light in a dark landscape.

Wolf Hall shows us how it felt to live in Tudor times.  It is not just a piece of "action".  It would be fascinating to see more plays and adaptations done in the same way.  Talk about shedding a whole new light on the subject....

Six Words

 
So the "writing family history every day in February" is going really well.  Not.  I got so bogged down in writing the goldfish story that the family history stuff went for a burton.  However, the goldfish story - my first creative writing since school! - was well received.  I suspect they were all being kind for a first effort but we shall see. 
 
This week I have been given the task of writing as  an "omniscient narrator" about a main character who owned a pink basque (we had to choose a number and these numbers then assigned to random items to write about....).  This is all new to me, I can tell you.  I had to look up the phrase "omniscient narrator"!  It turns out that some of my favourite books are written this way - it means a narrator who is not part of the action and can see everyone's thoughts and motivations and actions.  Pride and Prejudice was one of the examples given!  Who knew??!
 
Anyway, on the genealogy theme - which this blog is supposed to be vaguely about - one of the writing exercises sent by the Family History Writing Challenge did start me thinking.  I believe it is a useful little way of thinking about the characters you discover and also of distinguishing between generations who have the same name. 
 
It is the Six Word challenge [adapted by the FHWC from Six Word Memoirs in Smith Magazine.]
 
Choose an ancestor and attempt to sum up their life, the meaning of their life or the point which you wish to emphasise about their life in six words.  Think about unusual facts, character traits etc.
 
For example, I did:
 
Solomon Major - son in India, wife in Bristol
 
Edward Guest - drunken soldier, many children, appealed pension
 
Charles Shaller - army orphan, ended as a missionary
 
They just serve as little reminders when looking at long lists of repetitive names.
 
But can I apply this to the wretched basque?  Pink, black lace, nylon.....

Every day!

So today, it is back to "business", after my attempts to express our family situation in the last few weeks.  I have taken the plunge and signed up for the Family History Writing Challenge.  I missed this particular boat last year as it was well under way before I discovered it.  I nearly missed it this year but I did at least register before midnight on 1 February!

Anyway, it means that I have to write every day for the next month, in an attempt to get a good start on a longer version of my family history.  Today's assistance email asks me to choose a protagonist for the story.  Looking at the advice on whom to choose, I think I am going to use Joseph Shaller in this role.

I have written about him on this blog a couple of times.  Particularly a post called Great (Travel) Expectations in July last year.  Apparently, the protagonist needs to move the "action" forward, to have some kind of conflict - whether inner or outer - in their life and to be relatable.  Flaws are important for the relatable (Think flawed genius, detectives with rubbish personal lives, etc!).  And "something must change".

I am thinking that moving from London staymaking to a regiment sent to India, gaining an Indian wife and family and never seeing England again should provide these things!  Wish me luck...

In a further attempt to improve my writing, I have also enrolled in weekly creative writing course.  So I am also working on a short definition of the mystery genre of writing and a story from the point of view of a goldfish "including a description of a human".  The attendees at the course were a fascinating bunch and the thought of having to read my story out in front them on Thursday is already giving me palpitations.  They all seem older and far more experienced.  It was wonderful to see so many takes on a theme though.

Really hope these various enterprises do not get mixed up.....  India from the point of view of a goldfish, anyone?  A mystery set in the 30th regiment of Foot?  Now there is an idea....

[It is not too late to join the Family History Writing Challenge if you would like to have a go at improving your writing habits. 
Click here http://www.familyhistorywritingchallenge.com/]

Pure History

 

A week ago, I was living through an experience unlike anything I have ever witnessed before.  As mentioned in the last two posts, my father in law was nearing the end of his long life and last week, we lost him.

In the UK, when someone dies, it usually takes at least a week to organise a funeral and any after events.  A  memorial may take place at an even later date.  In Ireland, particularly rural Ireland, things happen much more quickly.  So if someone passes away on Thursday night, the funeral can be as soon as that next Sunday.  Without dwelling on the practicalities, you can see that this is quite a feat of organisation in every aspect.

 

However, last weekend in rural County Mayo was an example of pure history at work.  Living, functional traditions.  Not traditions shown in a "working museum" but right there as part of twenty first century life.

 

We had always known that such funerals are speedily organised.  My husband has, of course, attended a few over the years.  Apart from the obvious affection shown for my father in law, what made the greatest impression on me, though, was the attention to detail and the way in which these details were ingrained into community life.  Passed from generation to generation.

 

For example, as I was dashing from the airport to the house on the day of the wake, my husband called to say that he had an initial duty to perform.  He and his brother had to take a bottle of whisky to the cemetery and have a drink with the grave diggers.  By grave diggers, he did not mean council workers with a machine.  It was the sons and grandsons of the village men who had grown up with his father.  They did not offer this service as a favour, in fact until he was told to go and drink with them, my husband did not even know that they were doing it.  It is simply accepted that a burial party will be formed and the work will be done.  The grave is hand dug, using Irish turf spades.

 

Examples of such community tradition and spirit, interwoven with genuine kindness and sorrow, punctuated the entire proceedings.  From deliveries of food from neighbours to the huge number of people who took time on a  Saturday night to visit with the funeral parlour or the house, to press our hands and truly look the family in the eye and express their condolences.  From the full village Sunday Mass being turned into a funeral mass to the many people at the gale stricken cemetery to, finally, the grave diggers again, closing the grave in front of us.  It was streaming with rain, so windy that umbrellas were impossible but the oldest man  in the parish was laid to rest in the spot which he had chosen and as he would have said "the thing was rested, so".

 

As a non Catholic, non Irish person who had never been to such an event before despite over twenty years of association with the family, it was quite a shock to the system.  (Not least finding the coffin lid in our bedroom on the night of the wake, if I may inject a little humour...)  It was, though, a cathartic process.  By the time we were back at one of my father in law's favourite pubs after the cemetery, it felt as if we had done him proud.  Those ancient funeral and burial rites are there for a reason - they work.  Both practically and spiritually.

 

Now we begin the hard road of life without him.  RIP.

 

 

The Hints

One of the first few posts that I wrote on this blog was about the perils of taking research by others at face value.  I had been completely over excited by finding all sorts of "hints", as they call them, on Ancestry.  They related to a tree which I had been working on for a friend but I was not careful enough at investigating their provenance and everything got a bit tangled.

Unfortunately, I have not taken my own advice and have once again got carried away with clicking on hints without checking carefully enough.  Apparently once bitten, twice shy does not apply to me when I am immersed in work!  Must do better.  I now have to trace each item and check it.

I did get to thinking about this problem's relation to life in general though.  How many people search feverishly for long lost family only to find that blood ties are not necessarily enough to break down years of separation and/or resentment?

My mother in law has, in recent years, welcomed a niece to their rather large fold.  The niece was the child of my mother in law's brother but from his first marriage.  A child when the marriage broke down, she will never truly know what happened and it being a Catholic marriage breakdown, it was not really spoken of amongst the family.

This niece only properly appeared in the family's lives when her own father died and she and her siblings were unfortunately excluded from full participation in the funeral organised by her father's second family.

From then on, it was a matter of taking sides in many ways.  She approached some of her aunts.  Some, like my mother in law, remembered her and were glad to see her.  They welcomed her without asking too many questions.  Others were more wary, to say the least (!).

The niece, my husband's cousin of course, seemed to be a reasonable person and her presence was accepted quite quickly at family events.  She asked for addresses of cousins and sent cards, made calls and generally seemed to want to engage.

It gradually became apparent, though, that she had unresolved issues ranging from anger at the family to drinking excessively (and I mean early morning etc - not just at parties).  She had a neediness which seemed odd in someone in their fifties.  There were rows with family members.

Now that we are sadly facing an imminent funeral and wake for my father in law, I have no idea how this is going to play out.  You cannot exclude someone from funeral attendance.

The family tried to do the right thing and they accepted someone on the basis of blood ties without digging any deeper.  Why would you?  But the "hints" were there all along.  I am just hoping that this situation does not backfire on a day on which emotions will be very high.  It will be a step too far.

A Tribute to Experience

Sometime back, I wrote a post called The Oldest Man in the Parish.  It was about my 91 year old father in law and his memories.

 

Sadly, my father in law is now very ill.  We hope for the best of course but at 91, pneumonia is quite something to get over.  Whilst dealing with the rising grief and also the many practicalities involved in possibly having to get to an Irish funeral, I have been thinking a great deal about the loss of such experience from the world.  Strangely The Times had a piece today about the recent death of the UK's oldest woman - who died at 114 years old.  It was entitled "The Last Victorian" yet she was born in 1900, only a year before Victoria died.

 

My father in law was born in 1923.  The Irish Free State was not even a year old.  He lived in rural Ireland in a one room farmhouse (with a large number of siblings) and went to school - for minimal schooling - barefooted.  Meat was rarely eaten and poaching for salmon was rife.  He came to England during the Second World War and his passport declared him to be "an alien" (I know, I have seen it).  Most of what he earned went back to feed his siblings and mother, his father having come to England with him - they were wartime agricultural labourers.  He always says that his first memory of being in England was being on a train from Holyhead to Nottingham and finding himself in the middle of an air raid, the train plunged into darkness.

 

From then on, he worked to better himself, to earn more than just a living.  He married an Irish nurse who was actually born in the same county as himself but they met in Leeds of all places, at a dance hall.  After marriage he built up a haulage business with his closest brother and went into local politics.  I well remember a first meeting with him at which it became apparent that we were poles apart politically but we were able to agree on the necessity to at least vote and have your say.

 

I find myself in awe of his achievements.  My husband was the first of their family to go to university. A fact which reflects unbelievably upon my parents-in-law's progress as immigrants.  (I can only hope that they were not too disappointed that he came away with a future wife as well as a degree!)

 

Every death is a loss to human kind - a unique being, never to be repeated; often a wealth of knowledge and experience lost forever.  But the loss of the elderly is a confirmation of the march of time and history.  We tend to feel that the loss of a young person far outweighs the loss of an elder.  In many ways, this is true.  At least with an older person, one can rationalise by saying that they had a long and hopefully useful, happy life.  But they are still someone's relation.  And they are still a source of knowledge and memory that cannot be replaced.

 

Our society does not value such virtues.  A friend who is barely 50 recently spoke of the prejudice she is now facing in the job market.  She is in human resources for goodness sake!  Surely experience of human behaviour should be valued there if nowhere else!

 

If I do not post in coming weeks, you will sadly know why now.  Please spare a thought for the oldest man in the parish.  He and his contemporaries are the reason we are all where we are today, for better or worse.

It's all in the details

 

 

Today my Facebook account threw a completely curved ball at me by suddenly showing me a picture and announcing that it was what I had posted three years ago today.  It was of my family on holiday in Thailand and I was really quite taken aback to see it so unexpectedly.  Especially given the weather in the UK at the moment! [The above picture is of "our" beach but minus my family!]

That wonderful treat of a holiday is still very much fixed in the minds of my family, despite others since.  The place, people, food and general feeling of the place seem somehow to have implanted themselves on us.  How does this happen?  Does it happen when you get a perfect combination of those factors?  Do all your senses have to have been affected before you can take away such a clear memory?

 

I have written about the vagaries of memory before - pondering on how we store apparently long forgotten memories, only to have then reawakened unexpectedly.  Silent Witness this week included a police officer who suddenly realised that, as a child, he had been involved in the killing of his father.  You would think that such an event would be too traumatic to block out but it is well documented that we can block things if our brains choose.  Especially events when we are very young.

 

On a family tree, you can see literally the bare branches of a family laid out.  Memory is what provides the leaves, the detail.  There is currently a competition on Find My Past for the best family tree.  There are various categories but all have the advice that the judges are looking for details.  Not just names and places and dates.  Real personal information like newspapers articles, photos and family anecdotes.

 

A good start is that Family Tree magazine this month has an article on how to extract detail from old diaries.  Diaries and letters can of course provide much information about dates and relationships.  Just make sure that you read the other stuff too.  Trying to get a sense of a person is a greater skill than finding the name and date.  Use other people's trees on Ancestry and other sites - people chasing the same family connections may have different photos and anecdotes to yours.

 

And even if you are not mad enough (!) to start a blog, do make a note of your own memories if you have the time.  Even Facebook entries can provide an interesting memory every now and then, amongst all the selfies, dancing animals and other delights.

 

Embrace the Cliche

Oh dear, it is too long since I posted here.  I am afraid that I rather lost my confidence, ironically after doing a writing course!  It all seemed a bit too earnest and just would not flow.  Then Christmas, family emergencies, etc etc and I am completely out of the habit.

Funnily enough, one of my planned posts was about clichés in family history.  And now I have almost fallen into the cliché of the blog which is soon abandoned.  So January 2015 sees a fresh push to make sure that I write regularly at least.

The cliché idea came from watching The Great Interior Design Challenge.  I was outraged that some classic items (see picture!) incorporated by a competitor were referred to by the rather smug judges as "design clichés".  When is it a cliche rather than good design or good taste?  It made me wonder about the cliché in general.  Good old Wikipedia yielded these gems in reference to the word...

A cliché or cliché is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel...

The term is frequently used in modern culture for an action or idea that is expected or predictable, based on a prior event....

There is a widely mentioned story that Michael Parkinson's ancestors were investigated by Who Do You Think You Are? and that they were considered too boring for a programme to be made about them.  Who knows whether this is true?!  The story has done the rounds for years. 

If it was true, though, is this the cliché of modern family history?  Do we need to discover something unusual to make our family history seem more original, more noteworthy?  Is it a cliché to find that your family have people in service, people ending up in the workhouse, farmers?  What makes these people any less interesting?  They had humdrum existences - but don't we all?

I do believe that Who Do You Think You Are? is a fabulous programme which has done much to improve the image of family history as a hobby but, as I have written before, I do worry that it has caused us to believe a) that it is an easy hobby and everyone can quickly get back centuries on their family lines and b) that we should have unrealistic expectations of what our ancestors were, mostly, up to.  Not just a working person - a campaigning trade unionist!  Not just a soldier - a soldier present at an historic event!

I myself do have the added factor of Anglo Indian lines.  These are fascinating in many ways.  However, upon closer examination, the actual people fell mostly into the Anglo Indian "cliché" - they were railway drivers, telegraph operators, civil servants, all striving to maintain the British Empire whilst not fully being accepted by their wholly white rulers.  For generations, they can be seen to be "expected or predictable based on a prior event [ie their birthstatus]".

We should be proud of whomever we discover on our family trees.  One thread is just thread on its own.  It takes many threads to make a tapestry and that is how we should view our family trees.  And therein lies another cliché but hey....

Home Sweet Home

Recently I heard an exert from a book called My Life In Houses by Margaret Forster.  I think it has been serialised on Woman's Hour but I only heard one.  Maybe I can get to the rest on iPlayer.

However, it did get me thinking about my own "life in houses".  The other day my children were questioning me about where I had lived when I dared to live a life without them, how many addresses I have had and why, which houses I rented and which were "mine".

Over the last couple of years, I have worked on a couple of projects to do with the history of buildings and I do find it completely fascinating to look at who has lived and worked in a place.  Strangely enough though, for the first time in my entire life, this year I moved into a newly built house.  My family are the first people to live here and it is great to think that we are starting the history of a new building.  Not sure it will be as interesting to future researchers as Victorian buildings are to us but then the Victorian school inspector, who was the first occupant of my previous home, would probably not have expected to be investigated a hundred and twenty years later!

What about our ancestors' house choices?  On Who Do They Think You Are? they often manage to find the addresses of their subjects' ancestors and to take people to the relevant places or to see similar homes (Brian Blessed in the last series was a hilarious example of this!).

I have written before about the ten year gaps in census data.  About somehow we expect to see our relations still living happily in the same places as they were ten years previously.  Actually, we do often, in the nineteenth century, see our ancestors remaining if not in the same properties but at least in the same localities.  So we tend to assume that they are still doing ok.  What WDYTYA shows us though is that a bit of research into the addresses can give more clues about the conditions in which our ancestors were living.

Our last family house was a good example of this.  A large-ish Victorian townhouse, three floors, servant bells still on the walls when we bought it.  And when I looked into the history of it, there were middle class occupants.  However, the house was built twenty years or so after its immediate neighbourhood - composed of small terraced houses to house factory workers.

So you cannot assume that same neighbourhood means same condition when you look at census addresses.  What is going to be interesting in decades to come is how census data will help or hinder researchers in this respect.  We move so much more, so much further.  So many larger houses are now flats, so many old houses are now student properties.  I personally have lived at fifteen addresses in my life - parents' homes, student homes, moving to London and skint homes!  Then my own family homes and now we are starting the history of a brand new address.  An interesting thought - if I can prevent the puppy from chewing it down around our ears!