I have come to realise with the increasing age that genealogy is the province of the old. The young are too busy leaving their own lives to bother with those lives of others already completed. This is both as it should be but also as it is most frustrating. Trawling through ancient documents in the middle of the night, one feels almost a sense of proximity, of urgency, in their transcription.
My own children have been moderately uninterested in the process of finding of such genealogical study. Hang on, let’s be honest and replace “moderately uninterested” with “could not care less” that great aunt Desdemona was the first woman to breed a champion whippet in autumn 1823, or that 11 generations of Butterwick were agricultural labourers and married girls in the same village in the same parish church, going on to produce children, in turn baptised and married in the same church before death and burial in the same churchyard. The cyclic nature of life and the scope of its ambition mirrored in the parish ledgers. Most never ventured beyond the parish limits, finding all they needed therein. The next village was, without a hint of irony, “foreign”, its inhabitants “foreigners”.
Actually, just writing this makes them seem even less interesting than they doubtless really were. Lives were smaller then, both in duration and expectation. To seek to expand one’s horizons, perhaps by attending a different church – perhaps even a Catholic church (God help us) was seen as “putting on airs and graces.” This was Yorkshire after all, a county innately suspicious of such popery, with its stained glass windows and fancy incense choking the air with undue piety through its smells and bells. Pax vobiscum, Dennis.
Nor was the Methodist Church, with its sparse Wesleyan meeting rooms seen as equivalent, washed with its pale white light, free of distractions. Being able to recite long tracts of the Gospels did not impress God they felt. Modesty in all facets of life was the hallmark of Yorkshire worship, ingrained from the earliest of ages. You only have to watch Yorkshire batsmen in action to be transported to another age of grim self-denial, embodied in that bastion of Yorkshire cricket Sir Geoff Boycott, the knighthood coming in 2019 although Yorkshire folk had knighted him a handful of decades at least earlier.
Back to the genealogy. Despite my attempts to interest my children in the past, specifically their past, their disinterest continues to disappoint. I am worried that my several years of scholarship in this undertaking will be summarily consigned to the dustbin of history within a few weeks of my ultimate demise. Not for them, the details of deaths on the Somme and Passchendaele. Nor do they care about our phrenologist who appointed himself as”professor”. Or even our possible link to the Royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In fairness, I was much the same at their age. I was well into my mid 40s before I succumbed to the spell of genealogy. I met countless aged relatives each Christmas who, when fortified by glasses of Advocaat (them not me), would expand on their knowledge of ancestors, especially the black sheep of the family. Invariably a degree of embroidering accompanied such pallid reminiscences, adding colour sometimes at the expense of accuracy.
My biggest regret was my failure to ask difficult questions of my parents. My mother alluded to liaisons dangereux with Eastern European nobility in her grandparents’ generation. And then there was, of course, Professor Mills who despite his professorial status – questionable at best, operated from a tiny windswept stall on the south pier in Blackpool, offering to read the bumps on clients’ heads while selling herbal and back pills, guaranteed to relieve all manner of ailments, or persuading the punters to attend his public lectures or even enrol in his teaching courses on mind and memory function.
And that is the enduring fascination with genealogy. Basic BMD (births, marriages and deaths) provides the starting point, the skeleton one fleshes out with further detail, sitting the certain from the less credible sources. Certificates are soon swamped by family testimonies, court reports, newspaper articles, military histories, medals and so on. Quiet, unassuming Uncle Obadiah turns out to be a train builder, even helping to construct the Flying Scotsman locomotive. That sort of thing, revealed on discovery of his diary. Okay, he didn’t work on the Apollo program but his locomotives travelled further total miles than any NASA rocket, and generally without exploding.