There are many people who really do not understand why I love family history so much, why I spend so much time working on my One Place Study, what it is that keeps my interest. And, generally, those people have no interest at all in the subject. Fair enough, they have interests of their own which would undoubtedly bore me rigid!
But I recently came across this article by Marc McDermott which articulated very clearly what this research means to me. I will quote a few bits but the whole piece is worth reading.
Marc thinks that genealogy changes the way we see ourselves in the ‘grand tapestry of time’. I think he is right, that has happened to me, especially since I have been studying the Lost Hamlets in detail.
He talks about the feelings you get when you first see the handwriting and signatures of your ancestors on documents. “Because suddenly, this isn’t just data. This is a human being, moving a pen across paper, having no idea that their great-great-grandchild would be studying their handwriting centuries later.”
“That document you’re staring at? They touched it. Their hands were there. Their hopes were fresh. Their future – your past – was unwritten.”
He thinks of these documents as more than just documents, but as windows, portals, time machines transporting us to their lives all those years ago. The places they lived in, the paths and streets they walked, the churches where they married, many still standing, still holding services, still “echoing with centuries of prayer”, including those of our ancestors.
He describes how we find ourselves learning about the local history of where our ancestors lived, wanting to know what was happening in their day, what challenges they faced, why people arrived or left the village or even the country. And he has found that one effect of this is that time seems to diminish, that through studying maps, old photographs, the very landscape, we walk through their footsteps across time.
Then he talks about DNA, how we inherit their genetic code, the shape of your nose, the colour of your eyes, the way we laugh or walk – parts of them live in us. This is certainly true in my family, I realised only a few years ago that my brother and I had exactly the same laugh; a picture of my granddaughter at eight, bears a striking resemblance to a picture of me at the same age. I can trace the distinctive wavy hair at my forehead through several generations of Hopkinses. My hairdressers have learned that they have to work round it, it will not be straightened! Marc suggests that we inherit work ethics, talents, interests from our ancestors without realising it. “Whispers in your DNA”, he calls it, finding pieces of ourselves scattered through time.
Two hundred years, he points out, is just three or four lifetimes. “Your great-grandmother held your grandmother. Your grandmother held your mother. Your mother held you.” We are three embraces from history, three sets of arms link us directly to people who lived through events we read about in history books.
Of course, those ancestors never knew we would exist. They never knew that their decisions would “ripple through time to shape our existence”. They could not know that all these years later someone carrying their DNA would be learning about them. Someone marrying in 1875 would have had no idea that they would be creating a lineage leading to us. But we genealogists now are the people who get to join the dots, to see how their stories led to us. So we are living the culmination of “hundreds of lives, hundreds of choices, hundreds of moments of courage and resilience”. What a thought!
Marc points out that if any link in these genetic chains had been broken, we – as an individual – would not exist today, we would not be the same mixture of genes which produced us as people. Each of us comes, he avers, “from an unbroken line of survivors. Warriors. People who survived wars, plagues, famines, revolutions, who watched their world change and adapted”. We are each of us “the culmination of countless victories over death, disease, poverty and despair”.
We family historians are, he says, time travellers, story tellers, keepers of a flame which would otherwise go out. We find out old stories, rediscover forgotten names, draw back lives from the mists of time where no one remembered them. We can reclaim pieces of our heritage.
He goes on to suggest that in the future our descendants will do the same about us, google our neighbourhoods, walk our streets on Google maps, look at our signatures and photographs and feel that same sense of connection that we feel as we research. We are, he says, the link, the bridge between past and future, between what was and what will be. Genealogy, he says, is about “understanding your place in the grand sweep of time.”
He finishes by saying
“Remember: They lived their lives never knowing about you.
But you live yours knowing about them.
And that makes all the difference.
Own it. Honour it. Keep it alive.
Because you’re not just discovering your ancestors. You’re discovering yourself.”
I loved this article, I recognised many of the things he talks about, share many of his observations but he also made me look at some things in a new way, perhaps it will do the same for you!
rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk 