Sometimes a family tree is easy...type in a couple of names and before you know where you are you're back amongst the landed gentry of the 1300's...all family crests and paying vast amounts of monies to the Crown...not an ag lab in sight.
Those are the people with marble effigies in quiet country churches...lying side by side with a small dog at their feet their hands together in a state of ever-lasting prayer to be gazed at by casual visitors...or maybe they're buried under the stone flag you walk upon on your way to examine the stained glass windows above the altar...the wording worn away by the passage of countless faithful feet.
When those distant ancestors were buried in the village church centuries ago, the floor was covered in reeds or straw...the door was open to the elements as were the windows...dogs and pigs wandered in and out and travelling hawkers set up their stalls to sell their wares in the churchyard...sparrows and pigeons nested in the thatch...no polished wooden pews of course, they came much later...the congregation stood for the service and probably hoped it wouldn't take too long because there was a cock fight on later and they didn't want to miss it.
Coming down to the 1600's and those families sent their sons to Cambridge to study law...hired private tutors to teach them Latin and Greek and the Mandolin...daughters were married off while still in their childhood...Fathers left carefully worded Wills...'while frail in body but sound in mind'...people died from cholera and typhus and the narrow streets of London were nothing more than open drains littered with dead animals...maybe it was your six times Gt Uncle who picked his way through the stinking debris while on his way to his favourite gin house, where he could smoke an opium pipe and fondle one of the serving girls...her complexion riddled with smallpox scars.
By the 1800's most of the lands have long gone...sold to pay gambling debts perhaps or to fund a daughter being presented at Court...now it's only the seriously wealthy landowners who still hang on to their big houses and estates with herds of Deer and savage iron man-traps laid in the woods to catch poachers...whose sons impregnate the servant girl who ends up in the local Workhouse...those sons could be your cousins several times removed.
Most of our present people in this tree have little or nothing to show for having come from such illustrious beginnings...way back five hundred years ago...they live ordinary lives and worry about paying the mortgage...
I'd like to think that they know from where they came...I'd like them to understand their roots...the times when a girl getting married would have sewn her own shroud because she was likely to die in childbirth and that girl was your 12th Great Grandmother...a boy of twelve going to Cambridge to study Law...he may have been one of your Gt Grandfathers...perhaps he spent the rest of his youth wearing his long black cloak, while he wrote out lengthy deeds on expensive parchment with a quill pen by the light of a flickering rush dipped in fat...those deeds might still exist...rolled up and sealed with sealing wax...they may still be at the back of a drawer, in an musty cupboard of some old lawyers office...or carefully stashed away in a t-chest in somebody's loft.
There is little point in simply looking at a date...whether that is the 1300's or the 1700's...you need to bring those people...your people...to life. There is little point, I have always thought, in being gleeful because your tree goes way back into history if you're unaware of the lives your ancestors lived...
Antique dealers call it provenance...the story behind the old oak table polished to a surface like silk...how old is it...where did it come from...who owned it...
That is the way it should be with your ancestors...who were these people who lived five hundred years ago...
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