Creative Writing | Guide to Wine | Genealogy

Family Genealogy

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

The oft-quoted opening lines of L P Hartley's The Go-between usually produce a smile of acceptance or a nod of agreement, but rarely the question 'So, different how then?'

No one really needs to look too far to discover vestiges of the past. It can be found in houses, in snapshots in family photo albums, even in the shops we go to, even in the places where we spend our leisure time. Too often, the apparently ordinary or trivial aspects of history are ignored in favour of the grand monuments, the great characters or the momentous events. Yet it is the ordinary and the trivial that can reveal a wealth of information about life in the past. If they are overlooked for too long there is the danger that they will disappear for ever.

Our heritage is a rich one. All of us, everyday, experience some sense of the past. We see it all about us: a Victorian pub, a deserted factory, the local war memorial, the local common, even in the black and white films from the thirties and forties shown on the television. The past is in towns, in the countryside, at the seaside. Too often we hardly notice it, if at all.

Whether you think you are interested in local history, family history or community history, the truth is that you are in fact interested in all three - and probably much else besides. All history is about people: after all, family history is about people in places and local history is about places with people. To over-define either does neither a service.

Your past, the lives of your ancestors, was touched by national and local economics, religion, war and probably by disease, pestilence and the weather. You should not be expecting to tell the whole story, just that part that affected you and yours. If this book is different it is because it has tried not to restrict itself to any one discipline but introduce a whole range of Ideas for you to think about and try to use.

Of all the various avenues of historical study that there are, local and family history have the advantage of being the most accessible to the amateur sleuth. No formal qualifications are needed and the non-expert is not overly disadvantaged by not having an academic or scholarly background. Enthusiasm, supplemented by a little reading, is all that is required. To learn that bit more and meet like-minded folk, take advantage of the adult education classes that are certain to be taking place near to you, and join a local society. The difference between professional and amateur researchers, between full-time and part-time researchers, pales into insignificance compared with the difference between good and bad research, the only difference that really matters.

Researching your past begins at home. It begins with simple questions, such as: Who were my great-grandparents?; When was my house built? The answers to such basic questions are usually easily found and for research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no special skills are required. From such simple questions, and their answers, will hopefully come the desire for a wider knowledge of your own personal past. Answers produce more questions: where did my ancestors live? what did they do? why did they come here, go there? what was here before this house? why is my local hostelry called the Grosvenor Arms?

The past starts now. There is often a desire, perhaps resulting from a misconception, that researching the past means going back as far as possible as quickly as possible. Nothing is further from the truth. The 'whom begat whom begat whom...' syndrome is thankfully virtually moribund. If that is your bag, don't let us stop you. But you will have a much greater satisfaction by, as it is usually gruesomely put, putting the flesh on the bones as you go. Yes, do what you want to do, but tracing your family back to 1543 doesn't impress too many people these days and it is usually the uniformed who now ask the question 'How far back have you got?' It is how much and how well, not how far, that is important.

Lastly, we need to remember the words of John Berger: 'We are in our time and they are in theirs'. Tempting as it might be to judge and condemn, based on today's morality, ethics and beliefs, we have to respect the fact that the past was different. The past and our forebears made us what we are - but now is not then, and we are not they. What is strange, unacceptable and sometimes repugnant to us was the way of the world to them. The rules and expectations were different.

The past may initially appear to be inaccessible, kept remote by an impenetrable force-field of time: we may occasionally only see vague representations of it, as through frosted glass. However, the past is there for us to unearth. That past is our past and hopefully this little book will inspire you to undertake that voyage of discovery.


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