All In The Family

We made a big breakthrough this week while researching our family trees. We discovered that my Beloved (whose family have never moved far from a little village near to where I live now) and one of my closest friends (whose ancestors also lived in the same village for centuries) are related. Very distantly related, it’s true, but related all the same. It turns out that he’s the great-grand-nephew of the husband of my Beloved’s great-grand-aunt. On their fathers’ sides. I’m not sure if this knowledge is going to bring them closer but I think it might mean that they’re ineligible to marry.

Why do so many of us feel the need to trace our family trees? Genealogy is the second most popular topic searched for on the web (I think that you can guess what the first is). A recent study found that 84 million of us worldwide are actively searching for our ancestors. Those who want to get serious about it can spend hundreds of hours, pounds and miles tracking down that elusive great-great-great-aunt, about whom the only bit of information they know is that she was the sister of a boy named Valentine and she died in infancy sometime around 1749. Give or take a decade.

And on the other hand why do some of us not care at all? The past is the past, they say, and a family tree is just a list of names and dates, dull and boring like some kind of trainspotting with gravestones? Some people also don’t have the blokey-collector attitude required to spend hours tracking down the missing item, although the highest demographic of family historians are ladies in their late-middle age. Maybe it’s a generational thing too? Certainly more of us start taking an interest in researching our bloodline as we get older.

Not everybody wants to share their family information either. Many people have asked, ‘Tell me about your grandparents and aunties, Granny’, only to be met with pursed lips and a reply of ‘Oh you don’t want to hear about that old stuff. Now come and cut my toenails for me, there’s a good lad’.

My Mum once told me that I shouldn't ask questions about the family’s history if I wasn't prepared for the answers. I haven’t found any particularly juicy stories yet but you only have to watch a couple of episodes of ‘Who Do You Think you Are?’ to know that most family’s cupboards hold a couple of unexpected skeletons. It’s the historical equivalent of ‘Does my bum look big in this?’

Anyhow, so my Beloved is related to my mate. Me? As far as I know I’m not related to the actor Albert or the football legend Tom, even if they had ever learned to spell their surname correctly. But I suspect that I may have famous blood in my veins, even if it’s severely diluted by generations and beer. Some people dream of being related to a pop star or a supermodel perhaps? I’m aiming for one of the angriest, grudge-holding geniuses that this fair land has ever produced.

My mother’s family hail from a tiny village in Lincolnshire. Even now it’s not much more than two streets, a general store and a couple of derelict buildings where the pub and the post office used to be. In the seventeenth century – when just  about every second servant in the area bore my family name and the squire’s offspring – it was even smaller, the only building of any note being the manor house where little Isaac Newton was born. Now in those days people didn't have Sky Movies or X-Box to pass the winter evenings. They had to make their own fun. I reckon that I’m just one broomstick-jump away from grafting my tree to that of the country’s most famous fruit-header. How d’you like them apples?

It’s nice to see where we come from but ultimately I guess that those of us who research our family’s history don’t do it for ourselves. We do it for our kids, our grand-kids, our nieces and nephews born and yet to be. We do it so that they will know, long after we’re gone, that we were here and we cared. And so did those who had gone before us.

© Shaun Finnie 2012