Bone and Flesh

I don’t want to be an archaeologist anymore.  I want to be a resurrectionist.  I’ve spent the last three years believing that I’ve been digging up bodies of ancestors through the practice of genealogy.  The truth is that I’ve only been digging up lifeless, fleshless “bones”.

My 88 year old grand uncle, a non-genealogist, made me painfully aware of this during our telephone conversation this week.  He told me that his daughter-in-law had been doing genealogy for the Dell family recently, and that she had been telling him the names of our ancestors.  This new and exciting family information was interesting to him, but what he really wanted to know was how his mother and father met.  His father (Frank Charles Dell, my great grandfather), was born in Lambeth, and his mother (Lillie Louisa Jane Davies) was born in Margate.  Margate is about 250 miles east of Lambeth.  How then did Frank and Lillie meet?

I felt a number of things when he asked me this question.  First, I felt embarrassment.  Why had I never considered the question before?  Am I not the family genealogist?  Then I felt curiosity.  Uncle B., that is a damn good question!  So I consulted my research (a marriage certificate) to try and answer it:  Frank married Lillie July 26^th 1919 at the register office in Margate, Kent.  At the time, he was a bachelor of 28 years and was working as a tally clerk.  Lillie was a spinster of 20, and worked as a café waitress.  Their fathers were Frank George Dell, a pianoforte maker, and George James Davies a coach builder.

 

Bones can't tell you that Frank loved to wear a Trilby and Lillie kept mints in the pocket of her apron.

The answer to uncle B.’s question isn’t there, is it?  I’ve spent three years digging up my family like an archaeologist and all I have are some lifeless, fleshless facts – names, dates and places.  I have made a “rookie’ genealogical mistake.  More than this, many of us including myself have made this great and terrible life-mistake:  we never bothered to ask.

Uncle B. had 53 years in which to ask his father how he met his mother.  I have had 42 years in which to ask how my own parents met, and yet I have never bothered.  I just never bothered.

Do you want to get started in genealogy?  Forget the genealogy websites for a time.  Resist the urge to discover who your fourth great grandfather was.  Talk to your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles.  Get to know them, get to know their lives and their stories.  Learn the oral stories handed down to them from their parents and grandparents. 

Genealogy will only give you the bones of your family, but your living relatives will give you the flesh.

Next week (or two):  Tips for interviewing your family.

Dusk

What’s bothering me today, and has been for many days previous, is the knowledge that in time I will be forgotten.  I don’t quite understand it, really.  Shouldn’t I be afraid of the inevitable moment when I pass from life to death?  I don’t mind the setting of the sun, it’s the afterglow that frightens me – those inevitably passing minutes in which the sun’s light increasingly fades and shadows feed and grow fat.  My very last breath won’t just be the end of my life; it will be the gloaming of my life’s imprint.

Yeah.  I know.  I have friends that will immediately say they’ll never forget the impact I’ve had on their lives.  I also have those that will say I’ve been such an ass they’ll never forget me too (I heard those cheers!).  The truth is friends, and not so much friends, you won’t.  Time steals all memories away while you are living, while you are dying, and thereafter while you are lying still.  At best, all my years will become the most succinct summary; a name on a page, text on a piece of paper, or perhaps even just a number on a census.  Unless some nerdy genealogist intervenes, eventually I’ll be completely covered in both dirt and dark.

I will become a Mabel Thornton, who in a mere eighty years after her death – the equivalent of one good lifetime – passed completely from the memories of my family.  Earth and shadow had completely obscured her.  This nerdy genealogist rediscovered her as text on a page, a mere number “1” on the 1911 England census.  For the first time in English history, that particular census recorded how many children were born alive to the present marriage of each family, how many children were still living, and how many had died.  For the Thornton family, they had 6 children born alive, 5 still living, and “1” – little Mabel – who had died previous to the census.  Between the 12^th of March 1906 and the 5^th of December 1907, poor little Mabel had twenty months to take her first steps, say her first words, and suffer her first illness.  Twenty months and Bronchitis began her gloaming.

 

My Princess at 20 months

I found you, lost Mabel.  I know you lived.  I remember you, even if that memory is now only text on a page. A hundred and five years later, someone remembers you.  Who will be my nerdy genealogist?  Who will plunge their hand into the darkness, long after the afterglow, and pull me out of forgotten archives?

If you would like to know the techniques I used to find Mabel Thornton, contact me and I’ll lead you through it if you like.

In The Beginning...

     My fear and hesitation in starting a genealogy and family history blog is that it would hold no interest for those readers outside my family.  Indeed, I myself would never read a blog that solely recounts the lives of those I have no connexion to.  So, with this in mind, I am going to take a different approach.

     My direction and intention, then, for this experience is twofold:  first, I want to use my family story as a "springboard" towards larger subjects - birth, death, and everything in between; second, I'd like this blog to be useful educationally to beginning genealogists.

     Now that is out of the way, next week I'll dig into my worst fear, a fear even greater than that of death - being forgotten.