So, I would’t go to my older relatives for Reuters-style accuracy about times gone by. My great-grandfather’s memoirs show that he knew little of his family history beyond his first cousins, though they were fairly numerous one must allow. I now know an extraordinary amount about his forebears going back another seven generations, having had the luxury of consulting vital records centrally at the county archives and in London, later using the internet to verify particulars at the click of a mouse button. Family recollections may be inaccurate or sparse when it comes to specifics, but there is no substitute for them. My grandmother made some notes about her family which have turned up twenty years or more after her death. They are hugely significant for emotional reasons, even if they do omit many facts (such as her uncle’s death in a lunatic asylum): I am glad to have them. My grandfather was the last of his generation and recalls best those relatives close in age to himself. When I talk to him, I may have more precise facts to hand about these personalities than he does, but the difference is he knew them. To my mind, living relatives are a better source of background information than of hard-and-fast particulars – who can you remember from your childhood, what did they look like, what did they wear? It took me several years to work out the relationship of a family called Jenkins. I had the original lead from Grandpa plus the story, should I ever need it, of the family car running over one of the chickens when they arrived at the Jenkins’s farm. Indeed, misrecollection can sometimes be your friend. The early years of my lone Norfolk ranger, Ellen, were shrouded in mystery as we did not know in which tiny Norfolk village she was then living. I should not have located the village at all but her younger brother (who was later disowned), got his place of birth muddled with where he grew up, in a later census, and this led me to the parish of South Lopham. Ellen Smith is to be found living there, aged seven, in the census of 1861.
One can hear stories straight from the nineteenth century by talking to people with good memories. Cornelius Martin enchanted the younger residents of Castle Cary with his articles about the 1850s. Writing during World War Two he could recall the great cold as the soldiers came back from the Crimea, more than eighty years before. “Oh, it be cawld enough to skin a dog!” they said. It is worth adding, about Cornelius, that he at all costs avoided mention of his inebriated relatives. It is therefore amusing to note that he had in his youth managed to tolerate a job working for a wine merchants in Glastonbury. This experience really tipped him over the edge and he became a strict teetotaller, and to some an insufferable zealot. . . I love calling in on people and hearing them talk. Sometimes I feel I can’t contribute much but it doesn’t matter. When people are talking about those from the past it is so astonishing – suddenly one is thinking about events which are right on the border of our collective memory. . . Emma Bowden recalled the Mexican nursery rhymes she had been taught at the silver mines in Pachuca as a child and sang them to her own grandchildren seventy years later. On the return to England she had gotten lost in the crowds at Southampton, prattling in Spanish to the milling people until a catch by her sister’s arm had her rejoining the others.
gwinowan 