The history of family

As well as being well into my self-development, creativity and mindfulness, one of my main hobbies is doing my family history. When I say my main hobby, I mean it is the most time-consuming and costly of all my hobbies.

If you’ve started doing family history or genealogy, you’ll know what it’s like. You stick your details into a website, like Ancestry or Find My Past. Then you put your parents in. And maybe their parents. And suddenly the ‘hints’ go CRAZY. You start looking at the hints, and all these historical documents start appearing (if you’ve paid, website-dependent) and you start adding people and finding more people, and more people and more records…

I won’t go into doing proper research here. That’s for another blog! What I want to talk about here is a question that isn’t often really delved into: WHY are we fascinated with our family history?

A lot of people will answer that by saying what inspired them to start researching. For me, it’s the family legend that we’re descended from an English Civil War traitor. For a friend, it’s to discover the origin of a surname based on another family legend. For someone else, they want to know what happened to a great-grandparent. (If you want to know more about my family history, have a read through my other blog, Cornucopia of Kin.)

But those answers are why you start to research. I’ve been thinking more lately about why we’re fascinated enough with our family history to want to know about people that are long dead and therefore have little real impact on our lives, realistically speaking.

There’s a certain thrill about finding a new generation or breaking down a brick wall and finding a connection that was previously hidden. But why? What is the deep rooted desire we possess that makes us so interested in this history?

I think each of us is searching for identity. In finding our 2x great grandparents, or 3x, we’re creating a more solid identity than we might have without knowing where we come from. It might be a similar drive that children who were adopted have to find their birth parents – to know truly where they come from. Without knowing our identity, who are we?

Perhaps it’s knowing that we are connected to others, lots of others. It’s astonishing when you find more generations in your family history and the joy you have when that happens. It shouldn’t come as a real surprise – we’re all descended from someone after all. But there is a certain amazement in finding more people. Finding more roots.

Or maybe it’s knowing that our lives will mean something. There’ll be someone that will want to find out about what we did, beyond Facebook posts and our digital trail. It helps us feel more secure.

Feeling connected with others is a great attraction to us as human beings, generally. Family history takes us beyond socialising or Facebook and Instagram. Suddenly our connections run deeper than people we might know immediately. When researching an ancestor, we might see a family resemblance in old photographs, or particular personality traits.

I think my greatest satisfaction comes from delving into their deeper lives. Records only go so far – my imagination fills the rest and I love to ponder over why my ancestors did certain things, like move one house across the road, or from one town to the next, or change to a completely different job. That is the beauty of family history, compared to a more scientific genealogical approach of collating pedigrees and dates.

I hold a certain honour to be my family’s historian and records holder, storing memories – and therefore, in my opinion, the people. There’s that famous line about Remembrance that is repeated in all areas of our lives in the run up to 11 November, Armistice Day: Lest We Forget. We hold memories in our hearts and minds to ensure we don’t forget where we came from, how we were forged, how we became what we are now.

Family history is important to me, and to many other people. My life wouldn’t be suddenly awful if I didn’t know it, but it is certainly fuller because of my research. I didn’t anticipate finding so much meaning in my own family history – it has taught me about myself in ways I might not otherwise have known. It hasn’t just been in my family history either. In researching other people’s family histories, I enjoy giving them memories and meaning in their family. Somehow, everyone finds it delighting. When I mention I research family history, people inevitably say ‘I’ve never known where my <insert ancestor’s title here> came from’ or ‘my family apparently was related to <insert peculiar famous person here>’.

Honestly, I get whiplash when I hear that kind of stuff – my fingers itch to start entering ancestor details on websites to pull records. It is a total compulsion to do it, like a habit. I have no intention of kicking this one though!

It’s amazing the attraction family history has. You might not be your family historian or have ever researched it yourself, but perhaps you’ve wondered what happened to your grandparents, or where that unusual name in your family comes from, or the unusual heirloom. Then you’ll know a little bit about what I’m talking about.