99 Problems. Or not.

It is the Easter holidays and our house is ringing with phrases such as 'it's so unfair!' and 'you never let me'.  The joys of pre-teens.  God help me when they are another couple of years down the line.

This morning's major battle centred on how to spend the rather generous amount of Easter cash which has come their way from grandparents.  One, to be fair, was already saving for something and so has achieved his heart's desire far more quickly than we had anticipated.  The other, generally the easier to please, now has the money burning a hole.  Because the other has something due to arrive from good old Amazon so surely their cash needs to be spend ASAP as well.  This has entailed an ever more ridiculous list of items costing just about the right amount.  Items she never knew she needed.

So go the 'problems' for children in comfortable situations.  It was on the tip of my tongue to begin a lecture on the friends who recently lost their mother.  Or children at their schools who have much less than they do.  Or the many children in our city whose homes were flooded.  Or the children who are abused and beaten.  The child killed by a bouncy castle at the weekend. To say nothing of the millions of children caught in the increasingly widespread wars/famines/disasters.  But I did not because once I had started I would not have stopped and I probably would have cried and scared them.

Then when I came downstairs from dealing with my children's oh-so-awful problems, I found a programme called Man v Food on television (no idea what channel or why it was gracing our TV).  Apparently watching a person overeat is now legitimate entertainment.  We live in a world where millions are starving but it is perfectly the acceptable for the lucky minority to sit and watch other people stuffing their faces.  No doubt shovelling in snacks as they watch.

I cannot help but fear for the future.  I am counting on genealogy continuing as a hobby but I believe there is every chance it may start to be used Nazi-style.  And I fear our descendants will be doing their family trees and looking at things like 'when our family moved to that [Hunger Games type place].  Or 'look, that was the year when the massive wall was built in the Med.  So glad our ancestors were on this side of it.'  Whether there will be many humans on this planet in two centuries time remains to be seen though.

Numbering

 

Something very exciting has happened.  I have won a competition to have a DNA test!  No, not on Jeremy Kyle.  I entered a competition run by the marvellous Families In British India Society (FIBIS) before Christmas.  You had to write a piece about why a DNA test might be useful for your family history research.  And I have won one of the three places!

Now, clearly this is a niche subject to be excited about but just indulge me for a moment.  It hopefully means that I can narrow down which part of India my direct ancestors were from.  There are also questions over a number of Irish connections (ironic, given I have married into a large Irish family) and over the parentage of a great great great grandmother.  I wrote about all of these things for my entry and I have been offered a Family Finder test.  A kit is on its way!  How amazing and bizarre.  Let's hope there are no nasty surprises... Nothing anyone hasn't mentioned in the last forty or so years...  I will keep you posted - unless it is really embarrassing, obviously.

 

*    *    *

So I got that news last night and wanted to share the news.  However, I did plan to write about numbers today. A very good friend was (whisper it) fifty last week.  She does not look fifty.  Far from it.  But she is quite fed up about this milestone.  She says it feels very different to forty and no amount of reminders of the amazing fifty plus celebrities there are these days can cheer her up.  And I do see her point.  I haven't reached it yet but fifty years on the planet is quite something.

What would it have been like, though, in the days when fifty was properly old?  England, for example, in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.  When it was quite an achievement to have survived childhood, giving birth, dangerous employment.  There would be the same physical changes presumably but little knowledge of how to ease them.  And for the lower classes, there would be the ever present need to earn a living despite the ageing process.  Or the workhouse (or worse) awaited.

There are, of course, many awful cases of people in developed countries dying at young ages still.  Only the other week, I posted about cancer and diabetes and other diseases.  However, in general, a person reaching their fiftieth birthday in a developed country can reasonably expect at least another twenty years on Earth. 

What is very wrong with Planet Earth, though, is the number of human beings for whom fifty is still an incredible achievement and the number for whom fifty is not a time to look forward.  Life expectancy is very uneven amongst our race.  Fifty should not be a scary number for any of us.

Family Diseases Tree

So this week before writing, I looked back at what I wrote this time last year.  Sadly, a great deal of it was connected with the death of my own father-in-law and it is not an easy readback.  However, in some ways, it seems like far longer than a year ago.  My mother- and brother-in-law have not coped well with the loss.  Well, he was not coping before that really and if you looked at previous posts, you will know of the alcoholism which has consumed him.

 

We have lurched from crisis to crisis in the last twelve months.  Culminating in  my mother-in-law being hospital herself on the anniversary this week.  She broke her arm in a fall.  The fall was caused by a diabetic low.  The diabetic low, the doctors now think, was caused by early dementia.  She is not remembering what she has eaten/taken or when (it was even discovered last month that she had, for reasons best known to herself, thrown away the emergency injections from the fridge).  Quite a chain of events but one which it has taken many near misses to diagnose.  Falls without actually breaking anything.  Being found unconscious due to the diabetes but being brought round just in time.  Many incidents of slightly odd behaviour that we hoped were just age rather than the degenerative dementia.  So we start the second year with a whole new scenario but one with which, due to her location in western Ireland, we are struggling to assist.

 

Actually, both diabetes and dementia run in her family.  (Although for years, when my husband mentioned diabetes being passed down, she denied this!)  So what did the generations before do?  Close ranks and keep the person at home if it was dementia?  Just find a person unconscious on the floor when it came to diabetes?  My mother-in-law was born in 1933.  It was only around ten years prior to that when the first clinical diabetes treatment was made, although apparently there has been an awareness of diabetes symptoms since the times of ancient Greece.  (see Wikipedia for more information).  Dementia, of course, still has no effective treatment.

 

This is what the World Health Organisation website says:

 

Noncommunicable [by which they mean non-infectious] diseases were responsible for 68% of all deaths globally in 2012, up from 60% in 2000. The 4 main NCDs are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic lung diseases. Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutrition conditions collectively were responsible for 23% of global deaths, and injuries caused 9% of all deaths...

 

...In high-income countries, 7 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. People predominantly die of chronic diseases: cardiovascular diseases, cancers, dementia, chronic obstructive lung disease or diabetes. Lower respiratory infections remain the only leading infectious cause of death. Only 1 in every 100 deaths is among children under 15 years.

 

I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that at least one of my mother-in-law's grandparents had diabetes.  Her mother was born at the turn of the century and developed the disease.  A number of her siblings - of which there were around a dozen - have succumbed to it.  Or to dementia.  (Or both).

 

So in that family alone, there is over 120 years of diabetic history.  And they may be classed as having lived in a high income country but their own family background was, quite frankly, very poor.  Subsistence farming.  Plain food.  Few treats.  It is genetic.

 

More should be done to research these 'non-communicable diseases'.  The sad deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman in recent days have once again shone a light on the lack of treatments for some cancers.  President Obama has promised a push to 'beat cancer'.  But it is not just cancer that needs to be tackled.  We are encouraging developing countries to catch the high income countries up.  So it follows that we are storing up a future of increases in these causes of death.  Only recently, I heard a piece about how breast cancer research funding will only really take off when the world's biggest population - China - begins to see the effects of its modernisation on its people's health.  No-one wishes for another human to be ill.  We should not be waiting for these shifts to happen.  These diseases should not need to be trailing through centuries of family health.

Concise Descriptions

Well, week two of my resolution  to write every week.  Made it by the skin of my teeth!  I have had a subject in mind for a couple of days but just have not put fingertips to keyboard.  [End of excuses]

Anyway, it relates to last week's subject, Herbert Wason Major.  In continuing to attempt to solve the mystery of his provenance, I came across an army record for a Herbert Wason Major.  The dates all tie in so it may well be him.  However, what really caught my eye for the blog was the reasons given for discharge.  The record was not a personal record for him, more a list of soldiers discharged from that regiment and the reasons why.  It is from the 1870s and goodness, you would not get away with the reasons they used these days...

To give a few excamples:  'Old Age';  'Inefficient'; 'Worthless'.

And I began to imagine if we could use such descriptions in public service discharges today...

Quangos, MPs, civil servants, spin doctors.  And don't get people started on the Environment Agency or the local councils.  The list is endless.  To say nothing of the private sector. 

Of course things are so much better and fairer now.  But back then, they could dismiss someone's career of choice with a one word answer.  Chapter and verse for reasons?  Warnings?  Suspensions?  Why bother with all that!  Maybe these soldiers had been warned, reprimanded, penalised before their discharges but those one word descriptions do make for hilarious reading.  The words used as 'reasons' are repeated for different men too, which makes one wonder what the army's definition of "inefficient' or 'worthless' actually was.

If I ever get any time, I intend to look into some random discharge records and see if this habit was peculiar to this regiment.  Somehow, and rather sadly, I doubt it.

So long, Napoleon

 

 

So. I had pretty much given up on my blog.  Not on writing.  Or family tree stuff.  I just felt I had nothing sufficiently interesting to say and no time to think.  But it is a New Year.  With new goals and intentions.

 

And one of mine is to post once a week.  To give me a break from my attempts at longer pieces. I also have a renewed interest in my family tree (I will explain shortly) and I am hoping to stick to regular times for all of my writing so this blog commitment will help give structure.  I hope.

 

Anyway, the renewed genealogy interest has come in the form of a most annoying piece of news.

 

One of my most prized family discoveries had been my four times great grandfather, Solomon Major.  He joined the 66th Regiment of Foot in 1805 and in 1817, in Bengal, he produced (as ever, no sign of a mother on the paperwork, indicating illegitimacy) a son named Robert Clement Major.    Solomon left India in 1817 and his regiment were sent to St Helena to guard Napoleon.  A fact which, as an obsessive history reader, I loved.  (I ignored his abandonment of Robert and subsequent English marriage!)

 

But...  The Ancestry website very 'helpfully' leaves you links to items which may be of interest.  When I looked last week, for the first time in ages, there was a link to someone who had included the Majors on their tree.  But theirs looked very different to mine.

 

Now, I have blogged before about the wariness with which one should approach information from other people's trees (my own mother was dead and buried in America according to one Ancestry tree!).  However, I was really interested in this Major tree because that family is a real brickwall for me.  My great grandfather Frederick Clement Major did not leave India after Partition and we do not even have a date of death for him.  Other than his parents' names, his grandfather Robert and Solomon, I have very little.

 

But this new tree's Robert Clement Major had many children, one of whom was apparently Herbert Wason Major, Frederick Clement's father (come on, keep up!).  After fruitless digging, I posted a query about these extra siblings on Rootschat.com (an excellent source of help).  And after a number of replies, the whole top of my Major tree - including the treasured discovery of Solomon and Napoleon - is now thrust into doubt. 

 

So to cut a long and boring story short, I think Solomon as a wonderful family tale may be gone.  It looks increasingly like my Robert Clement Major should actually be a Robert Clement Major from the British Army.  He was born and raised in Barbados (!), married Mary (also from Barbados) and then lived all over the world before settling in England.  His children were born at various postings and his Herbert Wason was born in Jersey in 1853.  There is an army record for Herbert showing his resignation from his lieutenancy in 1876.  This would probably fit with his eventual Police profession in India.  Ex-military men often found employment in the Empire's police forces apparently.  It is the Wason bit which bothers me.  I have wondered if it was mis-transcribed before but I don't think so.  It is clearly written on a number of original sources and is just so unusual.  There is also record of connection between Wasons and Majors in Barbados.

 

The 1881 census is quite definite that Robert Clement was born in Barbados but there was definitely a Robert Clement born in Bengal in 1817.  At the moment, I can't prove either of these connections one way or the other.  But I reckon Herbert Wason might be the key.  His son, my great grandfather Frederick Clement, was very definitely Anglo Indian. If the newly discovered Herbert married an Anglo Indian then that accounts for Frederick's 'caste' , for want of a better word.  And there goes the Napoleonic dream. Bother.  Or other words.

Best for a while

I can't post a lengthy missive this morning.  I have done my back in so badly that I just can't sit in my desk chair very comfortably for a long time!

However, I did just want to comment on Frank Gardner's Who Do You Think You Are? last night.  I have enjoyed all of the programmes in the last couple of series but it was really great to see an episode which really pushed the genealogy line rather than just concentrating on one or two ancestors' stories.

Who would have thought anyone who is not currently royal or "landed gentry" could trace their ancestry to William the Conqueror himself?  There is hope for us all!  It was just a shame that the programme was not long enough to show the paperwork route to the Tudor ancestor.  I personally have stalled with my own tree in the late 1600s.  I am proud of having got that far but it spurs you on to want more!  Human nature.

I was terribly envious of Frank Gardner's visit to the heraldic college too.  Even if it was not my tree, to have the chance to visit such a place and handle those documents would be amazing.  Weird genealogy crush, anyone??!

Wedding Etiquette

Last weekend my family and I attended the wedding of a very dear friend.  It was a very modern affair in some ways.  They had been together for eighteen years and produced two gorgeous children before they decided to tie the knot.  Yet in so many other ways, it was terribly traditional.  Far more than I had expected.

 

This was brought home to me whilst sitting waiting for the bridal party to appear.  My nine year old was asking question after question and it became clear to me that every step of a wedding is very much ingrained into most of us by adulthood.  You just know what is happening, no queries needed.  I guess that would be the same whatever religion or tradition you have been brought up within.

 

At this wedding, things about the day, the ceremony, the meal afterwards - all of which seemed perfectly normal and expected to us adults - were a source of much mystery to my child.  It was the first wedding she could remember attending.

 

So why was the groom waiting at the front without the bride?  And why did we stand up and sit down so much even though it wasn't a church?  Who is being given away and why?  Who told me what to read out at the ceremony?  Do all these people have to talk after dinner and what are they going on about?  What are we "toasting"?  More importantly, why can't we go over there and just cut ourselves some wedding cake?!  The child's eye view was fascinating.  It really made me think about what a wedding means. 

 

And to add a touch of genealogical musing (which was how this blog started - and please note, I have resisted the temptation to comment on Who Do You Think You Are? yet this series!), I did think this week about how times have changed in terms of late marriages.

 

Currently, when you are searching nineteenth and early twentieth century records, you tend to be surprised by illegitimacy, by people living together according to the census, by couples marrying later after having children.  Such genealogical discoveries lead to mysteries, to brickwalls, to family secrets.

 

Now, though, we are well used to such arrangements.  I can name many happy families who have no parental marriage certificate.  So, just as in the future genealogists will find divorce to be common place, they will also have to deal with far more fluid family arrangements.  They might find my friend on a census with her family, they will find her children.  Hopefully, they will look way past there and see the marriage as well...!

 

It was a fabulous day.  Even the weather was kind.  But it was particularly a day for love.  My beautiful friend was never more beautiful.

 

The Return of WDYTYA

Far too many weeks since I last posted, sorry.  I had promised myself to get better at setting the timer thing to post more regularly.  Instead I have found myself on Yorkshire beaches, driving children to gym practice and walking the dog with ideas buzzing and no time to get them out.

 

However, I have managed to read Not My Father's Son, an excellent memoir by the actor Alan Cumming.  I heard him reading it on BBC Radio 4 soon after it was published last year but I have only just managed to discover the conclusion.

 

The gist is that at the same time Alan Cumming was doing Who Do You Think You Are? in 2010 - which turned up a completely fascinating family tale - he received a call from his estranged father, saying Alan should know, in the light of the programme being made, that he, Alan, was not his biological son.

 

The memoir is written in a number of  movingly interwoven strands - the WDYTYA shoot;  the time following its completion; childhood in Scotland; and early years as an actor.  The book is a great read and I really admire Alan Cumming for doing it but I won't discuss it further as I highly recommend reading it!

 

I watched Cumming's WDYTYA quite shocking episode when it was broadcast.  It has been fascinating, though, to read about what the poor guy was going through while he was on screen and talking about his ancestors.  And the childhood side of the memoir is awful but moving.  Human resilience in action.

 

However, as someone looking forward to the start of the new WDYTYA series (next week!), I was particularly interested in the machinations of the programme makers.  All the celebrities say, when asked, that they are told nothing before the shoot starts.  Read in the context of someone trying to deal with a personal crisis at the same time (albeit unbeknownst to the TV company), their methods seem almost cruel.  Of course, that is what makes good television.  Those special or disturbing moments, captured close-up.  I mean, they even squeezed a tear out of Jeremy Paxton so they must be good at what they do!  Television gold usually involves a "journey" these days and genealogy gives that in spades.

 

I don't imagine any of us, if confronted with the sort of information given to Alan Cumming, would keep a poker face.  The episode link is above.  Do watch it if you have not seen it already.  But read the book too.  The two make a good pairing.

 

And when WDYTYA returns, I think we should spare a thought for the celebrities who have agreed to take part.  Yes, they get top of the range (!) family trees given to them at the end but in return, they are expected to trip out their emotional reactions to whatever the producers have decided is most television-worthy.  Incidentally, for an example, in my humble opinion, of when the celebrity does not provide this entertainment, please see Sarah Jessica Parker's US episode of the show.  She literally had nothing to say....

Richard III - Cumberbitch

 

Well still no commas or question marks and the cursor is funny now too!  But I will persevere and post again.

Recently I was reading The Guardian app and at the end of articles they put links to other related articles.  Some are current but mostly they are historical by months or even years.  I have completely forgotten which article I started reading but it led to a piece about the fact that genealogists had proved a distant link between Al Murray The Pub Landlord (who was standing for parliament) and David Cameron.  It was a very funny piece.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jan/29/please-dont-say-im-related-to-david-cameron

.

This got me pondering about who I would and would not want to be linked to.  Of course in most scientific or religious theories we are all linked at some point anyway.  But how serendipitous was it for the finders of Richard III's remains when  Benedict Cumberbatch turned out to be related to the ex-king!  And links like that are gold dust for the producers of Who Do You Think You Are obviously.

So I have decided to keep pushing my tree in all directions until I come to a famous person.  I am already in the 1600s on one paternal line so that looks like slim pickings.  However I feel I must find some medieval king or personage on one of the lines.  Surely there must someone!  The journalist in the piece above mentions the idea that we are all related within 100 generations.  Plenty of scope for my ambitions.

 

If I want to guarantee a famous orator at my funeral though I will firstly have to become 1) so famous myself that they will want to be associated with me at all costs or  2)ensure my descendants are famous enough to get someone even more famous to officiate.  Link or no link.  Or possibly 3) lead some sort of battle get buried in a strange place and be dug up centuries later hopefully allowing enough time for really famous descendants to have made their names.

 

Maybe Richard was just waiting for Benedict.

Articles of Interest

I am away at present and will not be posting as regularly as usual for a few days but in The Guardian on Saturday 28 March, there were two pieces relating to family history subjects which I would definitely recommend reading if you can find them on the website.  I show the links below but if they do not work, do search on the website using the writers' names.

I Turned My Great Grandfather Gay - Patrick Gale

I Found My Birth Mother Through the Newspaper Small Ads - Catherine Chanter

Incidentally, I would highly recommend the free Guardian app.  You get the full paper as far as I can tell, as well as updates on stories.

It's Live!

Much excitement here at Piece of String HQ.  My husband has managed to wangle his work diary to enable me to go to Who Do You Think You Are? Live!

 

I suspect that I am going to be quite underwhelmed when I actually get there - such events are often quite frustrating due to the crowds.  However, I will not let that spoil the anticipation.  [He works away and it is usually impossible to pin down a whole day when he can take over dog, children, children's social lives, etc.  Trying not to think about the number of times he has changed his plans at the last minute...]

 

I am highly amused by the use of the term Live for the show, I must say.  I mean, it is a show about, mostly, searching for people who are anything but live.  However, it appears that this title is justified by the celebrity visits - people who have had their family trees done for the television shows.

 

And one of my main reasons for going is, in fact, to try to see the interview with Alistair McGowan on the Friday.  It was his episode of WDYTYA? back in 2007 which gave me the first real leads into my Anglo Indian ancestors.  I had had a lifelong interest in my family tree and as a child, had interviewed grandparents and others.  But despite some cursory searches online, I had not got very far with my dad's family.  It all felt a bit needle in a haystack and I had abandoned those lines for a quite a while.

 

The McGowan episode was a real turning point though, as mentioned before on this blog.  I had watched so many previous WDYTYA? programmes just out of interest.  I watched that one with a pen and paper in my hand.  McGowan genuinely had no idea that he had any Anglo Indian blood from his father.  It was fascinating. (Look on YouTube and you can see his reactions if you have not seen his show.)  As soon as the programme ended, my dad called to ask if I had seen it.  He couldn't quite believe it either.  I was already online at that point!

 

Being so inexperienced in genealogy then, that was my first foray into British Library India Office records!  (http://indiafamily.bl.uk/ui/home.aspx).  I only found one or two mentions of the surname Shaller but it was enough to give my search fresh impetus and spur me on to look for new online resources (Family Search, Families In British India Society, etc) which had not really existed when last I had attempted that particular line.  Strangely, my brickwalls on Shaller are now mostly back in the UK as they are pre-1837.  The Indian bit is as complete as I could have ever hoped.  Always looking though and open to new sources.  Plus I obviously have a number of other Anglo Indian surnames to work on and they are proving harder to crack.

 

I am not really sure what seeing Alistair McGowan Live is going to contribute to my research, come to that, but it feels important to hear what he has to say - if only because he was lucky enough to go to India to see his dad's home and meet some relations.  So, a day of mooching around family history exhibits, and hopefully attending the interview and some workshops, awaits me.  Well, got to get your genealogy kicks where you find them...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read All About It

Today I will be mostly scrambling to finish the book which I am supposed to have read for Book Group this month.  They are meeting at my house too, this time.  So no excuse.  But as I was walking the dog this morning, I was thinking that I really could think of much better things to read.  I do not like the book and with limited time available for reading, I am resenting having to persevere. 

I did also muse about the fact that we are so lucky to be able to read whatever we want, wherever we want, here in First World countries.  Imagine living in a place where learning and reading was restricted.  Many of the recent films for Comic Relief showed African children desperate to get to school, guarding the few books in their possession.  It is terrifying that our world is so unequal.

But how could I link this thought process to a genealogical blog post?  How did my ancestors go about learning to read?  What did they read?  Who taught them?  Of course, the history of education is a huge subject.  Most of us have a vague idea of the increase in child schooling which took place in the Victorian period.  We know that people used to leave school at much younger ages.  We have some idea of the rise of public libraries and we know that books used to be the preserve of the rich.

To narrow it down for this post though, I wondered about the schooling arrangements made for the Anglo Indian children.  The English soldier of the 30th Foot, Joseph Shaller, who took my family line to India, had four children with his Indian partner [the children are all listed as illegitimate].  Three of them were still alive when he himself died in 1822.  And thanks to the work of historian Carole Divall, I have, as previously discussed, managed to find original documents in the National Archives which contain those children's signatures.  Their handwriting was neat and legible.  They were clearly educated.  An assumption born out by the two boys' subsequent forays into teaching and the church as professions.

In the regimental diaries examined by Ms Divall, the number of "wives" and children with the battalion are shown for most months' entries.  In 1811, the Duke of York started a regimental school system and over the following century, teachers were recruited by the Army and sent all over the globe to teach both British soldiers and their children.  Apparently, it was quite usual for the sons of soldiers to end up joining the same regiment as their father so it was a good reason for spending money on their education, be they white or otherwise. 

Interestingly, although I do have other ancestors for whom this was the case, on this particular line it appears that their father's premature death [from illness rather than army action] led them to be taken up by a missionary society rather than joining the army.  So their reading matter was more than likely of a religious theme.  However, they had definitely taken advantage of the army education offered prior this and actually, the arrival of an education officer is mentioned in the diary. 

For Anglo Indian children, education also set them above full blood Indians to an extent.  Not in terms of colour discrimination socially but in terms of their usefulness to the British.  By the height of the Raj, Anglo Indian descendants populated the majority of the posts in civil service, the railways, the telegraph office and so on.  Positions of a certain responsibility but rarely allowed to be full in charge.  Relied on by the British because of their Christian, beholden upbringings yet not fully treated as equals.  Certainly, my grandparents received brilliant educations, at schools still well regarded.

Of course, this is a very minor happening in thousands of years of human education history.  Yet as can be seen now in Africa and other underdeveloped areas or in deprived areas of the First World countries, education is key to moving onwards and upwards for any person or for society as a whole.  Look at India now - the gaps between the educated castes and the others.

So I am going to try to be grateful for my excellent education, for my many life chances and for my easily-fed love of reading, even if it means reading The Geography of Bliss by tomorrow.  However, I do not recommend it....

Note:  Nor do I recommend falling asleep whilst lying in bed reading a Kindle.  Woke with a start to a fat lip as it fell on my face.....

The State of the Union

Today is the climax to the Six Nations Rugby Championship of course and I find myself a rugby widow for the day.  To be fair, this is a rare event.  It takes quite some important rugby event to persuade my husband to change his football habits.  [The lure of beer all day definitely helped his decision, I believe.]

 

However, when he does switch, he always supports Ireland.  He was born in the UK but, as whittered about in previous posts, he has Irish parents.  He will support England ahead of the others in a championship though if Ireland are not in the running.  There is a table of precedence, you understand...

 

And as I listened to the coverage on Chris Evans' Radio 2 show yesterday on the various points combinations needed to establish a winner today, I did wonder how these competitions work in other families.  In my family alone, I have an Anglo-Indian father who supports England with every fibre, a Scottish stepfather and a Scottish sister in law who are both highly patriotic but also mad keen Celtic fans for the football which links to their Catholic heritage.  This is a loyalty shared by my Irish Catholic husband.  He supports Middlesbrough as well, for his sins.  Are you keeping up with this? 

 

My nephew was born in England but, at three, for the sake of diplomacy, has to be dressed alternately in Scottish and England outfits in order to keep all grandparents happy.  His Scottish grandfather, my brother's father in law, is as Scottish as they make them for sporting loyalties.  Yet he voted against Scottish independence.  My brother continually treads a fine line of popularity with his in-laws due to his Englishness.  My step sister of course has a Scottish father but has an English mother.  I really must ask her where her loyalties lie on these occasions! 

 

And the thing is, I don't think we are that unusual these days.  A good friend has set off for Murrayfield today with her seven year old.  She is Scottish through and through but her son remembers only England.  And her husband is Northern Irish...  I could give many other examples.

 

The first rugby international took place in 1871 between Scotland (see picture above) and England.  And presumably, in ordinary families, this was an event only mentioned in the newspapers.  Not something to be thinking about and cheering or arguing about. 

 

It took around a hundred years, with the advent of the 1970s television coverage, for the Six Nations to gain huge popularity, although as far as I can work out, some matches were televised from as early as 1948 - whether rugby league or union.  As a child of the 1970s with a rugby mad father, I have vivid memories of him settling himself down for a good old shout at the TV, be it for the Six Nations or England v New Zealand All Blacks or whatever.

 

As our families have fractured with the increase in geographical and social mobility over the last 150 years, maybe the improvement in communications has allowed us to reinforce our sense of belonging to something wider via sporting loyalty.  (For rugby at least, it seems quite good natured.  I may be wrong.)  We can feel part of a wider picture, wherever we are in the world.  As for me, I do support England - it is what I was brought up on.  However, for the sake of Anglo Irish peace in our house, I will refrain from any match analysis, whatever the result today!

 

Pinky Glee

Tomorrow is Mothers Day.  When I was a child, this day was mainly about a card for my mother, made at school or at Brownies and a silver foil wrapped bunch of daffodils given during the church service for me to pass, with clammy hands, down the pew to my mother.

 

Today, nearly forty years later, I entered a supermarket and was confronted with a full commercial "buy this stuff now or it is landfill tomorrow" sales push.  Never seen so many pink and yellow chrysanthemum bouquets, so much cheap pink champagne.  It was literally a bank of pastel, blocking entry to the main shopping area.  In John Lewis yesterday, they were pushing the slogan "make her day special" or some similar thing - and most of the posters seemed to be grouped around sickly coloured sewing accessories and slippers.  Next was pushing slogan-laden homewares - all in pastel colours.

 

How did this happen?  I do not in any way object to the sentiment behind Mothers Day.  But since when did it become pastel and 1950s style?  I do wonder what our near ancestors would make of it.  All the women who pushed for the vote, for job opportunities, for equal education.  They could be forgiven for wondering if anything had changed at all if they materialised in some of the shops today.

 

One could argue that no-one is obliged to buy pastel stuff.  But what does it say about our society as a whole, that this is assumed to be what is wanted by the masses?  Bit chicken and egg, I think.  Do supermarkets and others force people down this route or are they stocked to the gills because their research tells them it is what their customers want?

 

Of course, I am slightly bah humbug here.  My husband is as likely as many to be in that customer base.  Dashing to get a supermarket bouquet for fear of me feeling left out.  So probably therein lies another whole debate - is this pastel vision of motherhood aimed at the male customer base?  And if so, what does that say about men's true views?  Is the traditional (and pastel!) thing just very comforting or is it just easy?

 

Of course, it is lovely to receive gifts and, pastel or not, it is the thought that counts.  I can't help thinking it might be nice to have a less commercialised vision of Mothers Day though.  Personally, I am hoping for breakfast in bed and children who don't argue for the duration.  That's not much to ask, is it?! 

 

 

 

 

Racist Superiority

 

I have been trying for a few days now to write a post about Indian Summers, the new Channel Four drama series, based in 1930s British India.  I felt somehow that I ought to, given my family interest.

But there has been a great deal of comment already though.  Be it travelogues on Shimla where the series is set, travelogues on the places in Malaysia which actually doubled for vintage Shimla, pieces about the cast, the missionaries, the administration of British India.  Many British India chat rooms have been buzzing with the why's and where's, the authenticity and so on.

 

And you know, despite my many posts about adding colour and "feeling" to your family tree, somehow Indian Summers has felt far too close to home for me.  A step to far in seeing how things really were, seeing the segregation of British India up close and personal. 

My Anglo Indian grandmother and great aunt had referred occasionally to stories which showed the casual racism with which they had lived in British India.  Disturbing stories like going to a British club and being turned away because of the skin colour line on the sides of their hands, which were checked at the door.  Or because their voices "gave them away" as Anglo Indian.

Indian Summers puts this racism right out there for all to see.  The Royal Shimla Club was shown with a sign saying "No Dogs, No Indians", British characters casually refer to "blacky whites" for the Anglo Indian children of the nearby orphanage, the awful humiliation of an Indian civil servant invited to a British evening party.  Just a few examples. 

 

Then, today, I was listening to Desert Island Discs and the guest was Bryan Stevenson, an African American law professor and civil rights campaigner.  He was discussing the lack of "truth and reconciliation" in the US, after slavery ended, after the white supremacist terrorist activities or even after the civil rights battles of his own lifetime.  He talked eloquently of what he is up against but one story which struck me was of Stevenson was sitting, waiting, dressed in a suit, at the counsel table in a courtroom.  The judge and prosecutor came into the courtroom and immediately told him to get out, saying he had no right to be at counsel table without his lawyer.  Bryan Stevenson said that he told them who he was and they both laughed but offering no apology.  Stevenson forced himself to laugh along because he did not want to prejudice his client's case.  The client he was waiting to defend was white...  He said that it really made him think about the state of the nation - that it should be so completely assumed that the lawyer could not be the black man.

 

It could be a story straight out of Indian Summers, straight from the heart of British India.  And yet it is 21st century America.  One in three African American boy babies is now likely to go to jail at some time in their lives.  This statistic is the worst it has ever been.

 

In South Africa, the "truth and reconciliation" process referred to by Bryan Stevenson was aimed at allowing the two sides of apartheid to come together and talk and hopefully to move on and live in some kind of harmony.  By simply packing up and leaving, the British avoided the need for this in India.  To them, they were at the top of the heap and everyone "beneath" was one and the same.  All Indians, all as bad as each other, despite the Anglo Indians' attempts to "be British" and despite the many religious differences in the nation.  Indian Summers has, I think, done a fair job of showing this endemic feeling of superiority, shocking though it is to watch.  But what is more shocking is that in so many places in the world, the same attitudes still prevail. 

 

Do listen to Bryan Stevenson if  you have a chance.  It is a fantastic programme.  And incidentally, take care when Googling.. Turns out there is a US porn star called India Summers.....!

Reasons

This week, I finally got to see The Theory of Everything.  As ever, I will say that I am no way qualified to comment in  professional manner on the film and this blog is not a critique of film or television.  However, I did greatly enjoy the film and  Eddie Redmayne's Oscar for portraying Professor Stephen Hawking was thoroughly deserved.  I did feel, though, that Felicity Jones as his first wife Jane Wilde Hawking was outstanding.  Maybe the subtleties of her performance have been overshadowed, in the media at least, by Redmayne's very physical transformation.

 

Particularly interesting in the context of the story as well.  Because the story is based on Jane Hawking's own memoir of living with Stephen Hawking as he deteriorated.  She must have felt constantly overshadowed, unnoticed.   That struggle is really the basis of the film.

 

Looking at the horrendous physical changes wrought in Hawking by Motor Neurone Disease, it did make me think about how lightly we take the definitions that we come across on our ancestors' death records.  You become slightly immune to the "reasons for death" unless something really unusual like a gunshot wound or a rail accident or "plague" (I have seen this on one of my Indian relations' certificates!) shows up.

 

In reality, nearly every one of those "reasons" has a story of struggle and  obviously sadness behind it.  Whether it be years of nursing someone with "Consumption" (TB) or dealing with the all too common effects of alcoholism - often hidden to us on certificates because of old fashioned names for it.

 

If we are truly to understand our ancestors' lives rather than just make a note of their birth and death dates on a diagram, it is important to look at these details.  We are unlikely to have access to a memoir like Jane Hawking's to bring such situations into sharp relief but just finding out what a "reason" actually meant can add a great deal to our feel for family history.

 

As a postscript though, I must say that three of us went to see the film and we all three agreed that Stephen Hawking would not have been an easy person to live with - even if he had kept his health!  He is a highly unusual personality to say the least.  Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) that level of observation and detail about our ancestors will always elude the average family historian!

 

 

 

Colouring In

 

 

My children have recently been asking quite a lot of questions about life and death.  They have just lost their grandad but actually many of the questions have been more about life than death.  Despite having visited their great grandparents' grave in Ireland, both seem puzzled as to whether their ninety one year old grandfather could every have had a mother and father. 

 

Eldest has more of an idea about "where babies come" from but still seems to have difficulty processing the idea that everybody - even the elderly, the homeless, the criminals, their favourite popstars - must have been spawned by a male/female liaison of some kind.  Youngest is quite keen on family history and particularly likes the fan style of chart about which I have previously posted.  It appeals to her sense of order.  She can see herself and see the preceding generations spreading behind her.  She is always slightly disbelieving of their place in her family though.

 

For myself, I am always looking for evidence of detail and colour in order to reinforce my hard found records.  On a recent post, I spoke about the candle lit scenes in the TV Wolf Hall.  I strongly felt that they added to the immersive experience of that adaptation.  In a post series interview, the director said that he tried hard to get across the sense, that you feel when you read Hilary Mantel's novels, of being in Cromwell's head, seeing things how he saw them and thinking his private thoughts.  I thought that this was achieved very successfully and the scene settings greatly contributed.

 

But how to get a sense of feeling and detail for our own ancestors, if we are not lucky enough to have rich and/or famous ancestors, with caches of letters and portraits and contemporary accounts?

 

The Family History Writing Challenge, which finished on 28 February, was not as successful for me as I had hoped. Been too busy to stick to its schedule of writing every day for a month.  It has, though, led me to really consider the colours, sights, smells, tastes experienced by my ancestors.  To make a story of my ancestors' lives, I have had to imagine what it was like to be them.  An eighteenth century Londoner joining the army; a Victorian girl going into service; a train driver travelling across India....

 

I believe that this is an important part of family history.  A black and white diagram should be the basis for other research.  Looking at the details of a person's life can bring them into a far more colourful view.

 

So the next time you find an immigration record giving a ship's name or a military record for an ancestor's regiment, try researching the ship or regiment's history.  It may seem like a tangent but by taking a leaf out of the historical novelist's book (!), we can make our basic diagrams far more three dimensional.  Then the lists of birth and death dates might seem more relatable.