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Descendants SOS!
by Val Atkinson
Article ID: 4, First Published: April 2004Everyone within sight of this article is a descendant, and we all need help.
We send out our signals, and sometimes we’re aided in a steady flow of:
Birth marriage and death certificates (all in the right order).
Census returns following steadily on with suitable useful informative ordered 10 year additions.
Boxes of photos annotated and labelled with names and dates.
Wills that give the ‘nth’ degree of sanguinary detail.
Diaries containing blow by blow life accounts
The rest of the time we root around looking for links, and marvel at the way our ancestors:
moved around without a ‘by your leave’
married in obscure places,
had six children baptised on the same day (ten years after said marriage),
changed occupation at the drop of a hat
generally made it difficult for us, their descendants, to find them.
Why did they do this? They didn’t consider us at all. They never gave a thought to becoming ancestors with anxious descendants searching for them. They just lived from day to day, much as we do, when you think about it.
A ‘proper descendant’ should be thinking about becoming an ancestor, and making it easy for his descendants to know him.
I saw a cartoon in the paper recently where a dog was sitting on top of his kennel saying:
‘I was born one bright Spring morning at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.
I was one of seven puppies, and my mother and father loved me.
Those were happy days’.
My daughter in law is a dog lover, and she knows the full genealogy of all her pets, my niece could tell you all the progenitors of her Arab filly, but the average man in the street would be stumped if asked for the name of his great grandfather.
‘Proper descendants’ aren’t average people because they know how to prepare to become ancestors.
And so I ask the question: ‘HOW RESEARCHABLE ARE YOU?’
‘Will you make a good ancestor, the kind you’d like to have for yourself?’
I’m dedicated to becoming a ‘findable’, ancestor. My descendants may not want the journals, diaries, holiday accounts, annotated photo albums, boxed and dated negatives, filed certificates, floppy discs of this and that, but they’re ready, and they satisfy a need in me to be available for my descendants, to be ‘there’ when they need me.
I’m a prospective ancestor any descendant would die for, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Fanatical? I’m the person they come to when they want to know who had chicken pox twenty years ago, and if a detective ever asks me where I was ‘that night’ I’ll be able to tell him! .
I’m joking but my reasons are important.
Let me tell you a real experience.
My husband was only two years old when his father died aged 31. His mother remarried when he was four, and he was brought up in a loving, caring home. He did ask about his father but in the 1950’s it wasn’t the ‘done thing’ to talk about dead relatives, so he never really learned much.
When his mother died, and he became really interested in family ‘delving’, he saw there was no history at all for his father. All the information he had could be written on half a side of A4 paper in very large letters.
There is an indescribable pain in seeing a close ancestor reduced to half a sheet of A4 with no happy ending.
To this day we have never found where his father was born but it was 22 May 1917.
Other mysteries include:
The visitor aged five in the 1881 census who stayed until her death twenty one years later, having her own income, the ‘best of everything’ and wearing velvet dresses.
The young man of nineteen taken from home by his father and left in the workhouse.
The couple who had banns read but didn’t marry until 30 years later.
I’m sure everyone has their unsolved family mysteries that could have been open and shut cases if a ‘proper’ descendant had been on hand.
REMEMBER THESE THINGS:
The beginning of this article is history by the time I reach the end.
Have photos taken even if it’s a ‘bad hair’ day or a ‘no hair’ day.
Keep a diary/journal (or both when you’re fanatical enough!), and don’t tear pages out later!
Be secretive and private if you want to, but write your secrets down. When you’re gone it won’t matter anyway.
Start with ‘I was born’, let the story unfold, and tell it how it is.
You’re the future ancestor of your unborn descendants.
TRUST ME IN THIS:
Everything unrecorded is the missing piece in the family jigsaw our descendants will struggle to complete.
Family research needs a ’giving’ mentality. No one assigns chivvies or badgers us. No one stands over us with threats. We just find the time and we do it from the heart.
I encourage you to be the ancestor your descendants long to have.
