For the past month or so, I have been involved in working out, digging through, compiling and sorting a very small set of dusty old records about the family of the Viscounts Gormanston, as those who have been reading the Journal will already know. Since posting the last two entries and trying to tell the story of one particular time in the early history of this one part of our old and widespread family, I hope I have helped readers to bring a little life to those dusty old records they collect and never know what to do with!
It also happens that - among other things - I teach courses in genealogy for adults in my local area. So this has been a great exercise to give to my poor students to help get the same point over to them that I have been trying to make here. But I find that both my students and the readers of the Journal have asked the same tired old question that always comes up when I do this sort of thing.
"Why," they ask, "go to so much effort when you already have the basic information?"
Information is nothing
Let's be straight, bold, up-front and honest about this: we are all of us involved in genealogy - the family history and ancestry of a group of people.Notice that - we are involved in two things, not just one!
For many people that simply isn't true - they want to know who great-grandad was, but beyond his name and a few other details they don't care. They simply don't want to look into his life, don't want to know that he was bullied into joining the East Lancashire Regiment in 1914, when he was only 15; don't care that he was sent out to the front lines at Passchendale, don't care that he lived for four years in the stink and the blood and the mud and that he saw his friends, brothers and leaders shot down in gore and filth. They don't care if he was gassed in the trenches or that on one day at the end of the war he and all his friends in the regiment climbed out of the mud to attack the enemy only to see 40,000 of their troops be cut down around them.
Now - you tell me: what makes you who you are, your family what it is, your studies worth reading?
Is it the dry, dusty numbers like "Great-grandad, born, 1902, died, 1918" or is it the tale of his life, the horrors and joys he saw and the things he had to live with, to face and to overcome? I know what I think is important - and it certainly is not the numbers and the pedigree.
Landscapes, not maps
Every one of us had a father and a mother.Every one of us was born - and so were our fathers and mothers.
Every one of us has a family ancestry reaching back beyond the very earliest records and into the dry savagery of pre-civilisation humankind.
We all come from the same few ancestors in Africa and far, far back we all come from the same few first human beings to walk the Earth.
Every one of us has that in common and no matter how much detail you can get to dress up your particular route from then to now, it is no more than just that: a route map to today. In truth, what matters is not the map of how you got here, it is the landscape through which you travelled. The personal history of each and every member of your family is far, far more important that the dry and dusty numbers of when they were born, when they married and when they died. Those numbers are just numbers - it is the story of their life which makes you who you are!
Often, people look at records perhaps a hundred years old and struggle to make sense of them. What I have done is show that with effort you can do it. You can make sense of your family records and for many of us those records will be far, far more complete for recent ancestors rather than those long gone in the past. But even when - as in the example I worked on - eight hundred years or more in the past then it is still possible to remember we are dealing with people, not with numbers.
Even from so long ago, we can put together what might have happened, and often can deduce what is the most likely to have happened.
Sometimes, you will not like what you find. There are skeletons in every family closet, and the further back in history your family goes, the more dust-covered, hidden, closets there are to examine. I was, for example, annoyed to find that my family had been supportive of Bloody-Handed Edward, the Hammer of the Scots - after all, a sizeable chunk of the Preston family are themselves Scottish!
Given that they did support him, I was more annoyed to find they probably supported his limp-wristed and useless son though I can't possibly say that I approve of them eventually betraying and attacking him, even if it was as part of the army of the Earl of Lancaster rather than a personal betrayal. I am certainly not happy that they could betray the Earl's own father to the King they would eventually betray.
The stuff of life
But this is the stuff of real life.This is what made our family what it is.
This is what we are and where we come from.
Not the numbers. Not the "Ooh, look, we were related to an aristocrat" notions so common in amateur genealogists. The real meat, the real issue, the real history - the real GENEALOGY - of the family is in the stories. I've had a few people get in touch with me about the numbers and the details and ask me why I am making room in the records for stories about individual people. Now, you know why.
It is the stories that matter.
