Story Lines

I love looking at my family tree.  A lot of people just want to know the names and places their family come from.  They want to get back as far as possible.  For me those names are pretty empty.  They conjure up little of the story and history and colour that went with them.  Consequently, once I get beyond the beginning of the censuses I start to lose interest fairly rapidly.

I love it when I can flesh out the births and deaths and marriages with occupations at the very least.  Employment records and Military records are even better.  If you are lucky, it is amazing how much you can flesh out the bare bones of someone's life.  Sometimes it is criminal records that come to light and I find these just as fascinating.  Sometimes you get a hint of poverty and tradegy you can only begin to imagine....  Children passed to siblings to look after, surviving members of families banding together.

Our ancestors were so close to each other.  You can see them marrying people who appeared as children two doors down.  You can see families living next door and imagine children growing up as a clan of cousins.  People from villages meet and marry in the local town and move around.  You can see how Ancestors, completely unrelated until a marriage in more recent times would have lived close to each other and have known each other, in some cases this is despite later generations having moved away and having no idea of these shared roots.

Family twists and turns through time and it ties us all together far more than we remember, far more than we realise.  I have been looking at a local friends family and ended up joking to F that she would have to be very careful who she married if she married someone else who was also local!  Marrying a distant cousin without knowing would not be unlikely!

Via researching my tree, sometimes I make connections with other people.  Like for instance a Fifth Cousin who is Californian born and bred.  Our ancestors once lived so closely together that they probably could not imagine ever not knowing each other, and yet here we are and their ancestors have no knowledge at all of each other.  And they have so many descendants that they would surely be hard pressed to keep track of them all.

I don't want my descendants to forget and be left with dry dates.  I want them to know me and to know my family too.  Which brings to another irritation with family trees...  Women appear as characters who get married, have children and then die.  Only the very poorest or most well educated had jobs.  These distant ladies are probably the ones I would most like to know and the hardest to catch a glimpse of.

I have a journal or two of ancestors, although not mine by anything more than marriage, I find them fascinating glimpses into another time, different lives....  I hope my descendants find mine as interesting.