I was forced to sit around today twiddling my thumbs and gasping like a Goldfish who'd just landed on the shag-pile carpet...
So the majority of the day was spent outside in the sun reading the concluding chapters of a thriller...didn't see the end coming either so that was ok...then I sort of staggered indoors and found a few people on Ancestry...like you do when incapable of breathing properly.
I'll happily admit to being totally obsessed...especially when Parish records are available...I peer at them hopefully in case the Curate was sufficiently interested to include the man's occupation...that rather depended on the area and the amount of vellum he had to spare for such trifling details...I swear my eyes light up when I see A Gentleman...because then he'll have more records...he'll have paid Taxes and left a carefully worded Will and his house might still be in existence and not buried beneath a housing estate...he'll have had his children baptised in the same Church he was married in...
And I have to confess to being pleased when I can get further back than the 1700's...and horribly disappointed when I find John Smith born in 1702 who appears to have never had parents or siblings...I trawl the records hoping against hope I'll find his Father...more often than not, he and others like him, seem to have been found under the Gooseberry bush with no record kept of their parents...
Prejudices get in my way occasionally...one of my own ancestors owned slaves in America...I skirted round him and pretended I hadn't read the newspaper reports of the sale of some of his slaves...described as 'strong and healthy' two of the young women had' picaninnies at breast'...another was said to be 'good with horses'...don't know how much these people cost because it was an auction.
The ordinary census returns often make my hackles rise...a child in 1851 working as a Straw Plaiter...she was eleven years old...but her younger brothers were described as scholars. The cotton weavers who were aged ten...
I have to remind myself that it was the norm for the times...much as I remind others who read whatever it is I've written...it sounds appalling...but that was then when times were different.
There are occasions when I make glaring mistakes...this afternoon I found several members of the same family who had apparently died in America...a likely tale I thought and altered all the info. Only to find it was true and they had emigrated...there were the passenger lists to prove it...quite why they left many of their siblings behind we can only guess at. Could be they didn't care for the idea of crossing the Atlantic in a leaky wooden boat...perhaps they'd heard tales of sea sickness and spending the voyage in the stinking hold surrounded by people coughing and vomiting...the food running out and fresh water rationed.
Just occasionally I come across a real gem...a whole family history carefully written down... who married who and the names of their children and the places they bought and sold and their nicknames among the commoners who worked for them...there'll be photos of their headstones in remote country graveyards and copies of their Wills and bills of sale for lands...
But too often it is the un-named and the forgotten people who are members of our ancestry...the women who birthed fifteen babies in twenty years of marriage whose husbands eked a living of some sort as a farm labourer and was once charged with stealing a sheep...it is virtually impossible to trace where the babies who didn't survive are buried...an empty exercise to try to go back further than the early 1800's...they didn't have the privilege of others...unable to read or write...leaving their mark on the certificate of their marriage. Unaware of their own date or year of birth...lacking the funds to pay a Vicar a small sum for baptising their babies.
Those people are just as important a part of our lives as the gentry...
Getting A Bit Cross...Again
