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There's More To This Than Meets the Eye
by Val Atkinson
Article ID: 23, First Published: March 2005I think I’ve mentioned before that my husband was a train enthusiast, and from being a young boy went ‘train spotting’.
When he started work, he saved for ‘Rail Rover’ holidays, and would spend his two weeks summer holiday with like-minded friends, travelling and living on trains for the sheer pleasure of ‘doing’ England by locomotive.
Train enthusiasts/spotters are considered eccentric suspicious characters.
I won’t go into the eccentricity of genealogists, because being one I dispute the idea we’re eccentric at all. However, as a couple my husband and I were considered a bit of a complex dual oddity, especially since I wasn’t interested in locomotives, and he wasn’t interested in microfilm readers (except from the purely technical aspect of how they work and how to fix them).
However, I will admit that genealogists do have their little ‘ways’, and their approach to the past is unique.
Here’s what I consider to be a very typical comment from an enthusiast, and one I can identify with:
“My family are either bored or exasperated with me. They cannot understand my interest in a load of dead people, even if they are my own family.”
I too have a sense of relationship with people I’ve never met, and in a way I can’t describe, it’s far from being a one sided relationship.
Say and think what you like, but I definitely communicate with my ancestors. I feel they know me and I know them. I often feel I’m ‘guided’ to find them.
Before I go researching I sometimes take a quiet moment to think of them and focus on them, so they’ll know I’m on their trail!
When I talk to other researchers, professional and amateur, I find many of them feel as I do, and we’ve shared experiences.
HERE ARE SOME ‘HAPPENINGS’ PEOPLE HAVE RELATED TO ME:
“I was very despondent while searching for an elusive ancestor, and the search had been going on forever. I’d tried everything possible and nothing was working out. Film after film brought nothing, and I was rapidly and furiously winding the last one off in utter disgust, when my pencil began to roll off the table.
I quickly stopped winding and grabbed for it, and when I turned back to the film, there was my ancestor’s name staring at me from the screen. It was the wrong date and the wrong place, but the right person”.
“ I wanted the marriage of William James STRONGE to Mary O’CALLAGHAN in November 1879. I found him in the indexes, but I couldn’t find Mary. I felt so deflated, and wondered if the William I’d found was the wrong one. I thought that maybe her name had been shortened to CALLAGHAN so I quickly scrolled back. NO she wasn’t there either. Miserably, I was just about to wind the film back when I heard a lady behind me say in a loud voice “ I’m looking for William James Stronge.”
I felt electrified and the shock was enough to bring me to my feet and go over , to ask if her William James Stronge was born in Ireland. It turned out that he was born in Cumberland and they weren’t related at all. TOTAL DEFLATION!
I dragged myself back to wind off the film, when my eye was drawn to the bottom of the page and there, handwritten, and out of order was Mary CALLAGHAN my matching entry!”
“I wasn’t in a hurry but decided to take a short cut through the cemetery on my way home from work one afternoon. I was strolling along on a random route idly reading occasional gravestones and generally day dreaming.
I caught sight of a stone a few rows in, half hidden by bushes, and for no reason at all, went out of my way to look at it.
It was for three members of my husband’s family that we didn’t know existed.
When we went to look up their births and marriages, the dates we wanted were on the first of every fiche we picked up”.
“ I had full details on an ancestor. One day I was at the computer, and I said to myself: ‘I haven’t found him on the 1881 census’. I hadn’t found him because I hadn’t looked, and I hadn’t looked because I didn’t need to, and I didn’t need to because I knew everything about him. Anyway, my mind wouldn’t let this alone so I eventually looked. I had difficulty finding him, but when I did he was indexed under another name because his mother had married again. There was a brother and a host of half siblings I didn’t know about.
This set me going, so I looked for him in 1891 and had the same difficulty. I located him under yet another name because his step-father had died, and his mother had married a third time. (More half siblings)”.
Now what do you ‘make of that’ as they say in NE England?
Each of these people experienced an unexplainable event or feeling:
• Why did the pencil roll off the table just then? There’d been two hours of chances to roll off!
• Why say ‘William James Stronge’ just at that crucial moment?
• Why take a short cut when you’re not in a hurry?
• Why ask a question that doesn’t need to be asked?
When someone says (as they often do!) ‘Why be a genealogist at all?’ I always answer with confidence:
I DELIGHT IN:
• The glorious experiences of discovery
• Transforming the unknown into the known
• Sharpening my mind on problems
• Bringing my past to life
ABOVE ALL I LOVE:
• That unexplainable link of togetherness forged between past and present
• That feeling of ‘relationship’ with people I never knew
• The sense that I and my ancestors are (in the words of the old hymn) ‘bound together with cords that cannot be broken’
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s very freeing when something can’t be explained. It means we needn’t hassle ourselves thinking of reasons, we can just accept or reject.
So finally, on the subject of the unexplainable, I feel quietly confident that I didn’t become a researcher by chance. Each of her children watched my mother researching, but only one followed.
I WAS THE FORTUNATE ONE, THE SAME AS YOU WERE, AND THERE’S MORE TO BOTH OF US THAN MEETS THE EYE!
