In a moment of idiocy I signed up for 14 days free access to Ancestry.com.
Like a lot of people, I'm curious about my forebears, particularly my father's father's side of whom I know nothing. I soon realised how utterly time-consuming researching my ancestry would be. Going through thousands of files looking for a particular person is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And my forebears were ordinary people; they didn't do anything wonderful except survive long enough to have descendants. I saw the BBC series "Who do you think you are?" which was fascinating and sometimes sad or funny. (Julian Clary's parents exhorted him not to find any German ancestors, and, lo and behold, one of his great-grandmothers was German; the olds were not very pleased), but unlike the celebrities on that programme, I don't have an army of highly skilled genealogical researchers at hand. So I've flagged it away.
The discouraging thing is that the records don't go back far enough. I would love to go back through my maternal line, right back to the Ice Age, but of course this is impossible. What did my cavewoman ancestress look like? Saxon me? Medieval me? Tudor me? And all one can find out from the records that do exist is names, marriage partners, habitations, occupations and offspring. Unless you are fortunate enough to have letters or diaries you can never find out the interesting stuff - how did they feel about their lives, and what sort of people were they? How did they adapt to the things that happened to them? It's just not possible to know.
My father made an oyster look garrulous. I do not know if he had siblings or, if he did, whether they or his father survived the war (he was a German Jew). Part of me would like to know the bare bones but I agree, the things that fascinate me are not to be found in genealogical records. It is probably one of the reasons I love to read diaries, letters and autobiographies.
ReplyDeleteFunny, reading the comment above. My mother's father was a Swiss Jew, moving to the U.S. just prior to WWI...
ReplyDeleteAnd yes: the day to day living of our ancestors, I find this fascinating. How did they entertain? How did they preserve their food? What was it like to get truly sick "back in the day"?
Greetings from Minneapolis,
Pearl
Hello, Pearl. Yes, getting sick would have been truly frightening, there would be so little that could be done. People died of things that could be fixed now with a course of antibiotics.
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