My mother died in November last year. I've had in my possession some boxes of her private papers for a few years; I've been looking after them for her. Now that she definitely does not want them back, it's time to take a deep breath and sort out what's there.
I have done some preliminary tidying up a little while ago. I threw out masses of wedding photos of complete strangers (usually the children of my mother's work colleagues), greetings cards to and from people I never heard of. There still remains a stack of assorted birth certificates and so on, which I shall have a look through.
Also in there is a parcel of unfinished family research which was carried out by my late cousin, Dave. Sadly - as is often the case - Dave started on this project after he found out he was terminally ill, once he was no longer working; he achieved a lot, and I shall be interested to have a nose through what is there, and reduce some of it to short notes for my own information. The thing to remember is that nobody actually cares any more; I've tried to pass on some family history to my own sons in the past, and they were polite about it, but very obviously weren't interested!
I hope to have a fascinating few weeks trawling through Dave's final efforts. One thing I found quickly was some information about yet another unknown soldier in the archives, Lt Col Ralph Hindle (originally from Chorley in Lancashire), who commanded the 4th Bn of the Loyal North Lancs Regt and was killed at Cambrai on 30th Nov 1917. I reckon he was my maternal grandmother's uncle (or maybe second-cousin) - my maternal grandmother being the infamously eccentric Preston Grannie who is quoted here now and then. I never heard of him before, anyway.
The Loyal North Lancs had rather a convoluted history - I think the 4th Bn may formerly have been a Territorial formation - no doubt I'll find out more as I get into the paperwork. The family were mostly Lancashire people - Dave learned quite quickly from his research that a great many of the Hindle males were named John or Ralph, and the females were usually named Mary or Alice (or both), so some care and attention to dates of birth is required to sort out who was who. Again - quite apart from war casualties - when you look at family details it is astonishing how high a proportion of the children died in infancy in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in Northern industrial towns. Hmmm.
I have tidied everything back into a single box for the moment - there are hundreds of old photos in there, so I'll need to get very organised.
I do not think nobody cares anymore. I believe as we age and consider the memories we will leave behind us that we come to appreciate the importance of passing on family history/lore.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly I went out with a girl with the surname Hindle in the 1990's and her dad was from Lancashire.
You may well be right Matt - I am not so sure. I agree that as each of us gets older we spend more time thinking/worrying about who we are, where we came from, and I'm aware that the Internet makes it easier to find things out. However, many of us will already have missed the opportunity to learn about ourselves by the time we get to that stage - I think that's an observable trend.
DeleteI'm just about old enough to come from a time (and a location) when family get-togethers and Saturday nights in the pub provided an important opportunity to tell the same stories, the same jokes, sing the same songs - constantly reinforcing (and, inevitably, adapting a little) an awareness of who we were, how we got here. In those days, in Liverpool the narrative for many would include an account of arrival from Ireland, or Wales, or rural Lancashire a couple of generations earlier, but for everyone there was a shared story which was hard to avoid - everyone tended to live in what were effectively village communities in the suburbs - my father's family all lived in a small area of Toxteth and Aigburth - every day I used to walk past the house where my father was born, on my way to school - it was just part of the scenery.
As the years passed, people moved away in search of work or education, slums were demolished. Lives were more complex, there were other priorities to focus on than family history. The pub sing-songs died out. We also moved to a time when people were much more interested in their own immediate needs, when the rise of social media shortened everyone's attention span and when old people - especially dead old people - were no longer interesting. I have lost touch with most of the later generations of my wider family - they are all over the world, we have nothing in common. I wish them well, of course, but they can make their own way.
Your former friend Ms Hindle's ancestors are very likely on Cousin Dave's lists. Of course, there have been a great many Lancashire Hindles who are not related - well, not as far as we know!
I'm in the same boat, but it's all currently in storage, Cousin Betty did all the family tree stuff and there are tons of it, Great Aunt Nina's papers need sorting out, and I've had lots of her artwork for years, but her letters and the 19C family recipe book are in copper-plate, and I just can't read it, then I found what looks to be Grandad's stuff from Deli, one day (soon - I'm no spring chicken) it'll all have to be dealt with?
ReplyDeleteH
On sensible days I remember that if I never get around to sorting out my mother's stuff then the world will not have lost much - it can all just go to landfill. But it nags at me - I will miss out on knowing some things about myself (so what?), and I will have a vague feeling of having let the side down. As I sit here, it is my sincere intention to get the boxes open and crack on, but it does become complicated very quickly - what is worth preserving? for whose benefit? why? I had a look at my great-uncle Alf Hindle's army service record yesterday; Alf was Preston Grannie's elder brother, but to be honest I don't think Alf himself would have been interested in his service record, so I think I'll lose that. Have to watch out for the dreaded completism - Pannini stickers of your ancestors. Have to mention, in passing, that Alf's two sons were christened Ralph and John, back in the 1930s - I wonder if Alf felt obliged to do this...
DeleteYou have quite a job ahead of you Tony.For one reason or another my family didn't talk much about their forebears. We did have a family bible with a list of ancestors but my sister lost that. Interestingly, for me, the Austrian side was more help as one of them had kept the documents Herr Hitler required of them to prove Aryan ancestry.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very unexpected fringe-benefit! Great story, Jim. I seem to recall that when I was a kid my wider family talked about themselves and very little else. I guess that if you go back far enough a lot of people were illiterate, so the endless repetition was a means to preserve an oral tradition. I hope the druids would have approved. My family are probably illiterate even now...
DeleteI agree with Matt that we get more interested in family history as we get older. I only started to get interested when there was nobody left (or able) to give me information although I think the internet has provided far more info than any family member could have. As you know, I have stuff relating to my dad's war service but that's because he went to a lot of effort to record it. I think it's quite natural for children to start yawning when granny talks about the old days - I know I did!
ReplyDeleteHi Ian - yes, I agree with you and Matt about the interest ramping up as we get older, though it bothers me a little that our online searching skills may droop a little. It's hard for someone to launch themselves into this. Apart from Cousin Dave, who had worked as a librarian and was Archivist for the Wirral, and therefore knew what he was looking for, my family has also benefited from the efforts of my mum's half-sister, who did a lot of tracking events and people down - much of it by old-fashioned postal communication - in her advanced age. She died this year when she was 90, but she had traced reams of correspondence and military records.
DeleteYour father's memoirs are superb, and have a significance beyond your family, I think - that was a great achievement. I was very sorry that I failed to get my own father to record his experiences working on radio communications and (later) radar at the Port of Liverpool during WW2. I had even contacted a Merseyside historian, and plans were in place for him to come up to Scotland to work with my dad for a week to record interviews and look through the old photos - but both my father and the historian died in quick succession before the deed was done! Yes, life is a bit like that...
Kids have always been bored by grandparents' yarns but, as I recall, when I was a kid those themes were part of our family conversation anyway!
Acoording to the Iliad, so wargame adjacent: 'The generations of men are like unto the leaves of the trees'.
ReplyDeleteIndeed they are. It seems from the photos here that the Hindle branch may explain the size of my mother's nose.
DeleteI'm another who agrees with Matt. I wasn't interested when I was young but am now, and my children who are grown up now are coming round.
ReplyDeleteYes, I believe this is true. I went to Liverpool for a week in Autumn 2024 with one of my older sons, and we had quite a few family landmarks on our hit list, including my great-grandmother's dairy in Toxteth, the church where my parents were married in Wavertree in 1945, houses in Aigburth where various relatives lived, the south end of the old dock system - all that. My son was interested, but it didn't help that most of this extravaganza was rained off - monsoon season! - so mostly we saw cathedrals, restaurants and pubs!
DeleteSounds like you have an embarrassment of riches Tony. I think the sad thing is that no one in families are interested in these things until it's almost too late. But eventually someone will be so don't chuck it all.
DeleteHi Chris - I start with the customary digression. When I was a lad my grandfather lived in Paris, and I used to visit him during the school summer hols. I met quite a few of his friends and associates over there, and one thing that impressed me was that, in this huge, modern city, when people introduced themselves, they always included where they and/or their people came from, as part of who they really were; their true identity was their history. Admittedly, people tended to be less in the moment than they are now, and conversation was maybe less transactional than it is now...
DeleteThe family gatherings and the pub evenings in South Liverpool when I was a kid were a celebration of who people were, but there was never any doubt about who we were anyway - with very few exceptions, families lived in the same areas for a lifetime - my childhood recollection of the big(gish) city of Liverpool is of a fairly small area in the southern suburbs, plus some bits of the town centre. Now people are spread about - scattered like seeds in the wind, as Preston Grannie used to say. Maybe it's only in later life that there is a need to remind ourselves what our inheritance is.
One of the scariest aspects of Cousin Dave's old family listings is that infant mortality thing - there were lots of big families, but it was common for only (say) 2 out of (say) 9 children to survive beyond infancy. OK - a lot of them were Catholics, there was a tradition of cholera and - after all - that's one of the reasons they had lots of children, but this is not the Middle Ages - this is a few generations ago, maybe 130 years - I have met some of the people on those lists...
That's fascinating about the way your grandfather's Parisian associates introduced themselves. Maybe two things were at work there. (1) It was a city growing through immigration so many people were from somewhere else (I can relate to that having been in Greater London for 40 years); (2) Your grandfather, being a migrant, mixed more with other migrants so point (1) squared.
DeleteIt's startling how you don't have to go back very far for it to be the "olden days". My wife, who is a generous number of years under 60, recently told one of the girls' boyfriends that her great grandmother was SOLD. In what is now acknowledged to be one of the most "modern" European countries (and roundabout the time that country gave women the right to vote).
That's very true. When grandfather first lived over there, in the 1930s, he seems to have hung around with British ex-pats (he was a terrible poseur - for a while he was big mates with Malcolm Muggeridge), but by the time I knew him his associates were "immigrants" from Clermont-Ferrand, or Marseilles (or, in his case, Wallasey).
DeleteAs I understand it, the French population at the start of WW1 was substantially agricultural - their industrial revolution arrived very late. The impact of that war was almost unimaginable in any case - the loss of the working population resulted in people moving far and wide. This is another subject for a chat in the pub, really.