The Schalter

Written by: Louise Morgan

“Seed, bark, flower, fruit, They’re never going to grow without their roots.

Branch, stem, shoot – They need roots.”

(Show of Hands, Roots.)

There’s a school of thought that says it doesn’t matter where you come from, what matters is where you’re going. Maybe that’s the right viewpoint: in an age where the friends we choose are often more important than the family we don’t, and when increasing numbers of us live hundreds – if not thousands – of miles away from our parents and relatives, what does our history matter?

Since the mid-nineties there’s been a definite shift away from family towards friends as the most important group in our lives, and now more than ever, it looks like our families are less of a factor in our daily lives than they used to be. Paradoxically, our interest in our family histories and genealogy is increasing – and has been for about the same length of time. What used to be a fairly niche concern now has enough pull to inspire several seasons of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, a show in which assorted celebrities investigate their family histories. It’s popular enough to have inspired a live event, held over the Mayday weekend at London’s Olympia.

It’s a curious, but apparently cyclical surge in genealogy’s popularity. It developed into the form we know today in the USA in the 1890s, when hundreds of local historical and genealogical societies popped up. By the 1940s, interest had waned – only to pick up again in the 1960s and 70s, driven by the Civil Rights movement. Again it fell away until the late 1990s, when the rise of the Internet made tracing your ancestry easier than ever before. It’s been growing ever since.

So why, if we’re generally less interested in our families, are we so interested in our family histories? Is it really as simple as hoping we’ll discover that we’re descended from landed gentry, or that we’re 1,998^th in line to the throne? Perhaps we’re looking for a hint of excitement – a long-secret love affair, or an ancestor sent to the gallows. Either way, poking around in the past can uncover all sorts of surprises: not all of them pleasant, as Griff Rhys Jones found out during his appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? Upon close investigation, it turned out that an ancestor who supposedly died following a train crash was actually fatally wounded in a street fight, and that his great-grandmother may have had her children removed from her and sent to Industrial Schools as pauper inmates. Not necessarily the kind of skeletons you’d want to yank out into the light of day.

“It’s not who you are underneath; it’s what you do that defines you”

Whether or not we find what we’re looking for, there’s no doubt that more and more of us are starting the search. Ancestry.co.uk, the UK’s most popular genealogy site, has over 17,000,000 posts on its public forums and a separate discussion board for every region. Queries range from those trying to get tombstone information on a branch of their family to people searching for information on possible ancestors who fought at the Battle of Hastings. There’s also a sizeable section devoted to crime: convict ship prisoner lists, pirate genealogies and someone particularly keen to find out whether he’s related to a Wild West gunslinger, all of which suggest there’s nothing as glamorous as a whiff of scandal – provided it’s not too recent, of course.

And the problem with poking around in the past is that sometimes, you find things closer to home than you expected – as we recently found out in my own family. My paternal grandmother was Serbian, and had always been cagey about her younger life. It wasn’t until shortly before her death two years ago that we discovered she had married to get out of her homeland: she had been vocally anti-Tito, and had been threatened with the gulags. On clearing her house, we found a box of love letters from my grandfather stuffed on a shelf in the garage, and another box containing similar letters to her from a Russian soldier in her study… lovingly tied with ribbon and a lock of hair: together, these discoveries left my father visibly shaken. Suddenly, he was led to question what he knew about his parents’ relationship and his own background – already patchy, he’s now unsure of any of it.

Not that there’s always a drama involved – nor does everyone researching their background expect to find one. I know a particularly cheery American who will gladly tell anyone who’s listening that he’s ‘One sixty-fourth Irish’ – and clearly he’s more than happy with having found that out (although I’ve never done the maths to work out just how far back that is.)

Maybe that’s what it’s all about? As our families split, we’re constantly looking for some way to define ourselves. Class boundaries are more fluid than at any time in history, and most of us can no longer identify ourselves depending on our jobs or the places we live. Perhaps that, combined with the wealth of resources available to us, makes genealogy so appealing? In looking for our roots, do we hope to find something that helps us with where we’re going, something that gives us a position in the world? More to the point, will it?

Can we still claim to be as clearly defined by our backgrounds today as we could a century – or even less than that – ago? Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely.

For the vast majority of us, our histories hold nothing more exciting than a diversion to wheel out at dinner parties, a trinket to convince us we’re ‘special’. In the grand scheme of things, what does it really matter that our great-aunt Mildred married the fifteenth son of an Earl, or that we suddenly find we’re distantly related to the Bamfords? On the other side of the coin, if we’re so keen to avoid the sins of the fathers, why are we so keen to embrace their virtues? What if there’s something back there in the murky corners of our family cupboard that really would have been better left alone….?

Looking back a hundred, two hundred years for our identity seems a pretty hollow way to find it – almost like we don’t trust ourselves to create our own. Fine, you want something to strengthen your identity, to give you some roots – you go for it. But it takes more than roots, doesn’t it, more than a handful of other peoples’birth and death certificates to define you as you are? Surely in our shiny new modern age, the era of the individual and of personal responsibility, we are what we do - not where we came from?

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This post is tagged family, Family Trees