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!

Where will we be and who will be watching?

 

 

How do we imagine our species' future?  Where do we think we will be in one hundred, two hundred years times or even longer? 

 

We have been marking the centenary of the start of the First World War this year and the last soldiers from that have only just died.  Next year sees the two hundred year anniversary of Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon.  I am sure that the participants in Waterloo never envisaged the carnage of the First World War but then, at the end of the First World War it was said to be the war to end all wars and look what happened....

 

I am going to see the new Hunger Games film this week.  My son and his friends are very keen on this whole genre of writing.  Survival, apocalyptic future etc.  When I was their age, I remember starting to read George Orwell and thinking, well he was wrong about Big Brother and all that.

 

Yet this week the media are raging about digital privacy versus the need to keep tabs on what terrorists and others are up to online.  Big Brother really does exist.  We all know it but choose to go along with it, driven by the belief that the spooks are not looking for "people like us" and of course they have not got time to check our online trails of films, emails, shopping, chatting.  Yet we expect someone, somewhere to keep tabs on our neighbours' secrets.  Their illegal porn habits, their illegal film downloading, whatever.  We want someone to police all that.

 

The thing is, what if a "nasty party" gets in to power and the legislation that they need is already in place?  The ability to watch everyone, to detain without the courts, to take passports, etc - all the things that we are told now are needed to deal with the very few.  Could they be turned on the majority?  Or at least, turned on a scapegoat minority like the Nazis did?  In the future, will a party like UKIP (or far worse) be able to convince us that immigrants should be turned away and ethnic communities deported?

 

In terms of a family history link to this, I guess as ever I find myself fascinated with what my ancestors would make of the world in which we live now.  I have vivid memories of watching Tomorrow's World as a child and seeing items about innovations like bar-coding, shopping from home and pocket computers.  And it all seemed quite unbelievable and very unlikely!

 

My ancestors who travelled to India must have found themselves hit like an (as yet mostly uninvented!) train with the difference in culture and could never have envisaged a time when you could fly to India in a few hours; a time when India is as powerful as it is now.  They could not even perceive of India as an independent entity.  Imagining a future like the Hunger Games or 1984 would have been impossible.

 

Wouldn't it be amazing to go back in time and be able to give your ancestor an ipad or something and get them to record their lives in real blinding colour?  How did it feel to be there?  If nothing else, the current obsession with social media does mean that our descendants will not be short of such material, provided it survives.  And survival is the key, as the participants in the Hunger Games know only too well.  Let us hope that it is not too worrying that we can start to imagine a future like that.

The Big Society

 

This is just getting ridiculous now.  I had promised myself to write at least every other day even if I could not manage every day with the new puppy around. Yet here I am over a week later!  I will not bore you with the reasons for my lapse!

 

Anyway, what to muse about?  Actually, I did find a rather interesting tale in someone else's family tree last week.  I was trying to push one of the lines a bit further back and I stumbled upon a lady who had died in an asylum run by her trade union.

Emily Harriet Rumball was born in around 1819 and for most of her early adult life she was listed as a "bookfolder" or "bookbinder" on the censuses.  In 1852 she married James Swygart in Shoreditch.  From what I have traced, the couple had at least four children, one of whom, Emily, is my friend's direct ancestor.  (She married a Sainsbury but sadly not one with supermarket connections!).

James died in 1872 in Holborn and it appears that Emily Harriet returned to working as a bookfolder to keep herself.  Certainly by 1881, she was living with the Sainsbury-married daughter Margaret and her family, though still giving her profession as bookfolder.  This was in Islington.

In 1891 I found her on the census for Balls Pond Road.  And this is where my pure curiosity is so right for this work!  Next to her name was a number and I thought it referred to her house number.  Then I began to notice - by studying the image rather than the transcription - that all her fellow residents were bookfolders, -binders, etc.  Quite a coincidence?

It was not until I flipped back through the images of the previous pages that I realised that Emily Harriet was living in the Bookbinders Provident Society Asylum, shown above.  I had no idea such places existed.  We hear about the workhouses and reform schools when we do Victorian history in our school years but trade union-run asylums?  All full of single profession people with problems?

So I did what one does these days in such situations.  I googled.  Sure enough, the bookbinders formed a friendly society in 1830.  By 1843 there was also a charity for building an almshouse/asylum.  The two societies amalgamated in 1865.  This big society slowly expanded apparently, until 1882.  Eventually, the asylum site was sold in 1927 and the Society relocated Whetstone in London's suburbs, building cottages to run on their new site.

the asylum building no longer exists on Balls Pond Road - which connects Islington with Hackney and is quite sought after now as those unable to live in Islington have gentrified the edges of Hackney.

 

Looking back at this story from our 2014 viewpoint, it seems like an amazing story of charity and the growth of social responsibility awareness.  One does wonder, though, what Margaret Sainsbury, the daughter who was housing her mother, had to go through to get her mother into that charitable institution.  How desperate did things become before they were able to get help with her elderly and presumably deteriorating mother?  Does this all sound a bit familiar?

 

I have friends at the moment who suspect that they have parents with the beginning of dementia.  The hoops to jump through to get help are so high and so numerous that one could be forgiven for wondering if much has changed since Emily Rumball had to be admitted to the Bookbinders Asylum.

Supermarket Ethics

I do not have time to write a great deal today but I found that I could not let the day pass without commenting on the Sainsbury Christmas 1914 ad.  It "premiered" last night (why have we now become Americans with "premiers" and "finales" on our televisions??) and the internet has been awash today with debate on the supermarket's use of the First World War "Christmas Truce", comparisons to the John Lewis Monty Penguin ad, etc etc.

When I googled the truce in order to find the above picture, it seemed pretty clear that most of the press is united in thinking that the use of this incident is, to say the very least, unsavoury (and outrageous if you are the Daily Mail!).  And for once, I must say that I totally agree.

My son showed the ad to me this afternoon - I had not looked at Facebook or Twitter today - and my initial reaction was definitely one of discomfort followed by disgust.

When this ad went out, we were barely twenty four hours from the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  You can just picture some young pushy ad executive sitting in a brainstorming meeting going "oh yes and if we are going with this theme, here's great idea, let's get it out as near as possible to the eleventh.  Why not on the eleventh?  At eleven?"!

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I have little personal connection to the First World War but those millions of men died for all of our futures.  Did Sainsburys think it was doing a good thing?  Did they see the public reaction to the Tower of London poppies and rub their hands, knowing what was coming?

The thing is, the ad is a good piece of film making - for all I know about these things! - and the sentiment "Christmas is for sharing" is an excellent one.  What sticks in the throat is the use of this incident and that sentiment to sell more Christmas groceries and gifts.  Presumably, they thought that hooking up with the Royal British Legion would help to divert some of this discomfort.  They thought we would think it was almost a public service ad, not a supermarket wheeze!

Unfortunately you have to enter one of their stores to buy the special chocolate bars which are giving 100%of their profits to the Legion.  And while you are there, you may as well get a few other things...

Paul McCartney used the Christmas Truce incident in his "Pipes of Peace" video years ago.  At least he had a peace theme and was well known for campaigning against war.  Although he was trying to sell records, so you could argue that one both ways.

I feel that I m ranting so I won't go on.  A final thought, though, is that it is a worrying indictment of our society when advertisements are becoming events in their own right.  Advertisements used to become news stories as people became aware of them.  They were not pre announced into our viewing schedules!  Their makers hoped that the desired effect would be created and word would spread (eg the Levis guy stripping in the laundrette!).

Whatever happens now though, whether the ad continues to be shown or whether public outrage continues to mount and it is pulled, Sainsbury have achieved more column inches and more search engine mentions than one can imagine.  It is wrong to have used such a poignant event to achieve this. And here I am, adding to that publicity.  A good place to stop my rant, I think.  If, by some miracle, you have not seen the ad, just google or go onto You Tube.....

A Big Fan

The above chart is a fan pedigree chart.  I first saw one of these at the York Family History Fair a couple of years ago and thought then that they make a very useful way of seeing your progress.

Typically, I then forgot all about it until I did the recent "Organising Your Genealogy" course which I have blogged about previously.  [See Pharos for course further details.]

This week, though, I printed off a new set of blank fan charts.  You can do this by simply Googling "fan pedigree chart" and choosing your preferred website.  There are also sometimes blanks available to print or download in the "learning center" areas of Familysearch or Ancestry.

The reason I did so was to check my progress with a friend's maternal family tree.  I have been working on this for some time - having to take a break due to not having enough "dog sleeping hours" in the day when the puppy arrived! - and I was anxious to gauge my progress.

It was actually very gratifying because the fan chart enables you to see clearly how many generations you have gone back on each line and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had done six generations on at least three lines and five on most of the others.  I must say, I had not realised, from my pile of notes, quite how many generations I had gone back.  Fortunately, her ancestors were all mostly in the same areas and were devout church goers - handily picking churches with registers that ended up on Ancestry!

So as you can see on the chart, you put the name of the "owner" of the tree in the centre bottom circle.  The fan then progresses outwards with the boxes getting smaller and smaller (tricky if you are hand writing the chart!) as the generations expand.  On the above chart, the main four colours denote the four lines from the owner's grandparents.  Within each colour way, the shading denotes the increasing number of different families per generation.

A simple version of a chart like this - with perhaps four generations - is an excellent way to show family history to children.  My daughter really understood her grandparents' lines once she saw a simplified fan pedigree chart.  You don't even necessarily need colours but a coloured in chart, framed, does look nice - a good gift for grandparents maybe, this festive season?!

The other advantage that this week's exercise has given me is that I can now see where the main gaps in the tree are and I m able to concentrate my efforts on filling these in, rather than just pushing back the lines which have proved easier to follow.  I would like to get all lines to six generations as this means 1700's rather than 1800's.  And I am so pleased to be saying that - the tree is a real testament to all the people who transcribe all these random church registers and other documents.  I salute their efforts.  You try reading some of the "original images" on the websites and see whether you would be confident enough to publish what you have deciphered! 

Find A Brickwall!

 

 

Further to my brief post about the Find My Past freebie weekend, I have tried really hard this weekend to break down some brickwalls in the USA using my extra access.

My Anglo Indian great grandfather, Frederick Jackson Shaller, had a brother named William Charles Shaller who emigrated to the US from India well before Partition.  This much can be definitely said.  However, I could previously only find one marriage certificate for him despite someone else's Ancestry public tree naming two wives.  I was hoping that the US data would help to solve this conundrum.

However, the FMP freebie weekend has actually deepened the mystery rather than beginning to solve it.  I was able to access the transcript and original image for the 1930 US census and the person who I assumed was the second wife is shown quite clearly as having been born in Montana in the US whilst the two eldest of the three children and William himself are shown as having been born in India.

 

The ages given for William and this "census wife" Dorothea are 52 and 37 respectively.  The eldest son is 20.  There is a marriage certificate from Bombay in 1906 which shows William marrying "Effie Moore" but it is "Dorothea" with whom he entered the US via Boston in 1920.

 

The eldest son Leslie was born in 1910 and the middle child, a daughter named Dorothea, was born in 1912 - both, as I said, in India.  The naming of this daughter would seem to point to the "census wife" being her mother, if not the mother of Leslie also.  The third child William Aubrey was on the way when they emigrated and he was born in New York.  He was nine years younger than his sister.  It is one of his descendants who has put a public tree onto Ancestry.

 

So is Effie Moore actually Dorothea?  Or was William married briefly to Effie and then - at some point between 1906 and 1911 - to Dorothea?  Was Leslie born to Effie or Dorothea?  If the age of 37 on the 1930 census is correct, Dorothea would have been 13 in 1906 if she is "Effie Moore".  I do have other relations who married at such an age, in Anglo Indian circles but 1906 seems quite late for this still to be happening.  the others are mostly early nineteenth century.  I have not been able to find a birth or baptism record for Leslie, which might have helped.  It is yet another Anglo Indian brickwall.

 

Funnily enough, when I search various sites for "Dorothea Shaller" in India quite a few turn up - well, not masses like for Jones or something but more than usual for that surname! - and they all appear to be connected to my tree in some way.

 

I have started to think about whether "Moore" is the route to go down.  However, a first glance search proved to be quite disheartening - there are many Moores.... 

 

I hope, if you tried the freebie weekend, you had better luck.  Find My Past is a good service, although its redesigned website takes a bit of negotiating.  I still get confused by its "Record Set" and "Record Collection" filters.  I shall plod away at this brick wall for a very little while longer - the freebie ends at midday today!