[Reader-list] ancestor worship/ kathryn hughes

[Jyotirmoy Chaudhuri]

Dear Readers,
Those of you who love or do hover around archives, record rooms, internet
archival resources and such spaces may find this article interesting,
amusing and hugely enjoyable. So, do not trash it, download it and read it -
in your own time.
Best,
Jyoti

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Ancestor worship 

Genealogy is now more popular than pornography. What does that say about us?

Kathryn Hughes
 
I had never been interested in family history. Or rather, I had always
steered clear of it. In my family the stories seemed so sad. The great uncle
who was dropped from the boat race at the last minute; the second cousin who
was almost a bishop. There was a constant sense of just missing out on being
rich, smart, important or successful. In our family you had to dance with an
awful lot of people before you got to the Prince of Wales.

Later, when my life had not gone as well as it should have-when small
failures had taken the gloss off what was supposed to be a charmed
existence-I fell to thinking that it might actually have been damaging, this
sense of myself as coming from a long line of people who never quite got
what they wanted. It seemed to inform the things I chose to write about. My
first book, which had been brewing for years, was a study of Victorian
governesses, a class of marginal women if ever there was one. With their
noses pressed against the goings-on of grander people, their touchy pride in
their status and their unconvincing insistence that it was inner qualities
that mattered-my identification with them, I see now, could be traced back
to my inverted family romance.

All this was unconscious. In my thinking life, I took scrupulous care to
avoid ancestor worship, even of the upside-down kind. I had grown up in the
home counties, where people had a habit of putting up their family trees in
the lavatory. Indeed, in mid-Sussex bloodlines were so important that
animals had them as well. The dogs in these self-assured homes usually had
pictures of their parents and even grandparents in the downstairs cloakroom.
In my more uncertain home, we made a point of getting our animals from
rescue centres, where they arrived without pedigree or personal history. I
assumed that this was because, since my parents were both only children, we
needed our pets to match the fact that we had no cousins. Now I think it was
simply because, without a flourishing family tree and pictures of doggy
ancestors, there was more room to make up stories about who we almost could
have been. 

So when I started my new book 18 months ago, a biography of Mrs Beeton, the
Victorian cook and teacher of etiquette, I had not thought about family
history-mine or anyone else's-for a long time. For someone who seemed to
embody not only a particular tradition but Tradition in general, Mrs Beeton
turned out to be a surprisingly slight character. Not much was known about
her. All there was to go on were a couple of bad pictures and a sketchy
chronology. No one could say exactly when or where she was born. She may
have had four children, or five. Her mother's name was uncertain. Her
grandfather died either in the 1820s or the 1840s. This obscurity will come
as no surprise to anyone who has tried to track down a middle-class woman in
the days before proper public record keeping, but it still sat oddly with
the received image of Mrs Beeton as a rooted and conspicuous presence in
Victorian domestic history.

As I went on with my research, this slipperiness started to make a kind of
sense. For instead of the middle-aged household authority of popular
imagining, Mrs Beeton was actually a 25-year-old journalist who knew how to
ventriloquise the voice of an older, expert woman. Her public persona was so
untethered to biographical fact that it could be tugged and pulled in any
way that made commercial sense. Although she died in 1865 at the age of 28,
"Mrs Beeton" soon became a lucrative brand name that was used to sell a
range of products over the next 150 years. Even today her name shifts
indifferent supermarket pasties. My job as her biographer would be to strip
away the layers of myth and hype that had wrapped themselves around "Mrs
Beeton" until there was nothing left but the modest, proven chronology of
the girl who was born Isabella Mary Mayson.

This wasn't as reductive as it sounds. By getting back to basics, I could
begin to build a richer picture. By tracking Mrs Beeton through census
returns, spotting her in parish registers, confirming her death in the civil
register, I would not merely start to make sense of the emotional patterns
of her life-the trauma that came from losing a father at the age of four and
the misery of two dead babies by the age of 25-I would also be able to place
her in the volatile social world of early Victorian Britain. I could hunt
down the occupations of her grandfathers (as it turns out, an odd pairing of
vicar and groom), look at wills, work out bank balances, find out how many
servants she and her husband, the publisher Samuel Beeton, employed. I could
trace her trajectory from its wobbly start to its untimely end. I would be
doing family history, but with a difference. It was not mine, but someone
else's and it would be done in the service of public narrative rather than
personal fantasy. 

But I had not bargained for the sheer power of genealogy, the capacity it
has to suck you in to its neverending stories. When I first visited the
Family Records Centre (FRC) in Islington 18 months ago, I should have
spotted the telltale signs of a cult straight away. There was the bookshop
with its specialist literature, from My Ancestors Were Merchant Seamen to
the darkly Gothic Disused Cemeteries of Outer London. The assistants, too,
were oddly knowledgeable and engaged for public service staff: instead of
having to strain to catch their attention, it was hard to shake them off.
And then there were the punters who started to fill the place from 11 am
(though they look like early risers, amateur genealogists are thrifty and
always travel off-peak).

Over the following weeks, I got to know the rhythms of this group of men,
women and adolescents who arrived each day to track down their great-great
aunts and long lost cousins. They stow their macs in lockers, come prepared
with pencils (being caught in possession of a biro in a public record office
is shaming), and know exactly who they want to find each day. On the first
floor, where all births, marriages and deaths since 1837 are stored, they
heave and swing the giant registers around with practised ease, like porters
in a meat market. Whisking through pages with an expert index finger, they
scan the lists of copperplated names, searching for a second cousin who was
born during the war, a great uncle who turns out to have been married after
all. 

At first I could not understand the stifled whoops of pleasure-an intake of
breath, a hissy y-e-e-s-that accompanied a "hit." But within a few days I
had my own repertoire of victory signals, the most explicit of which was
"got you, you bugger!" It is very satisfying tracking down someone who has
been eluding you, scampering out of sight, falling between the cracks of the
paper record. Isabella Beeton was like that. She was born a year before
civil registration began; she was absent from the 1841 census when the rest
of her family was present and correct. Wherever she should have been, she
was not. When I found her-born on the other side of London from where
anecdote had placed her, lodging in Cumberland when she should have been in
Cheapside-I did a little dance of joy. Anywhere else it would look mad; in
the FRC no one batted an eyelid.

Upstairs at the centre is where you go to consult the census. It is a tricky
business, especially if you are trying to locate a household between 1841
and 1871. There are indexes and conversion tables to puzzle out, reels of
microfilm to spool through, impossible Victorian handwriting to untangle. It
is grinding work but, for constructing family trees, invaluable. The census
doesn't just tell you where your ancestors were living one random summer
night each decade, but provides you with their ages, occupations and family
relationships. They may have fibbed to the authorities, but that is half the
point: the stories people concoct about jobs, lovers, children and
birthdates send you to the places where you need to dig for deeper truths.

So useful is this information to family historians that the authorities were
caught off-guard at the beginning of this year when the 1901 census went
online. It lasted only a few hours. Over-burdened by 1.2m hits, the system
collapsed and has stayed in a doddery on-off state ever since.

The Public Record Office was wrong-footed over the 1901 census because it
hadn't realised what most people already knew: that genealogy is now Britain
and America's biggest hobby. To be accurate, it is family history and not
genealogy that pulls so many people to the FRC every day. Aside from the
professional historian, it is hard to see who could possibly be interested
in the story of a family other than their own. Indeed, there is nothing more
tedious than going down to the refreshment room in the FRC and finding
yourself corralled into a discussion with a stranger about whether their
great uncle emigrated to Canada in 1892 or 1895.

Initially I had other, more high-minded excuses for avoiding these
conversations. I remained convinced that most visitors to the FRC were
frittering their time away on ancestor worship, when they could be thinking
constructively about the future. I had a fantasy-wrong and snobbish, I now
see-that they were returning to the local Rotary club to bore people with
accounts of how grand or special their family had once been. A little of
that may go on-there are several websites dedicated to helping you discover
whether you are descended from royalty. But by forcing myself to attend
carefully to snack break conversations, I began to realise that what people
were hoping to find in their family tree was not so much grandeur as
difference. They were reacting, I think, to a sense that, these days, it is
hard to tell ourselves apart. Thanks to social and economic changes-welcome,
mostly-in post-war Britain, we increasingly look and sound the same. We have
the same jobs, eat the same food, have the same expectations. What family
history can do is put you in touch with something that feels rougher and
more real. An illegitimate grandfather is just as acceptable as a duke.
Ideal is a grandfather who was the illegitimate son of a duke. Things that
used to matter even as recently as 20 years ago-a great aunt in the
workhouse, an uncle with syphilis-now seem positively sparky. Having a
cousin who went Awol from the army is something to boast about. Shame, thank
God, is not what it used to be.

Yet there remains a tension in these stories exchanged over the sandwiches.
Whichever way you slice it, genealogy generates a fatalistic narrative that
makes you the passive recipient of whatever your ancestors happened to hand
down. It is chillingly determinist. But the people I spoke to, people like
Bill from Maidstone and Jo from Tottenham, seemed to be doing creative
things with the ancestors they had found. They were using them to generate
new stories, ones that opened up rather than closed down the future. Bill
said he had found a great uncle who, according to the 1861 census, was a
wax-flower maker and wondered what it meant. Was that why his eldest lad
worked as a florist, something which had always, well, surprised him? Jo,
who had herself down as a north London Irish Catholic, "so boring it wasn't
true," had come up with an émigré step-grandfather and a clutch of
step-cousins, presumably still living in Lithuania, "it's so exciting, I
keep wondering what they're doing right this minute."

Thanks to the internet Jo will probably soon be able to find out. For every
person who visits the FRC on an off-peak train ticket, there are ten people
at home logging on to the huge number of websites dedicated to helping them
trace their family trees. Indeed, genealogical sites now get more daily hits
than those offering pornography. The sites range from those of the various
branches of the Public Record Office through to big American commercial
outfits such as Ancestry.com which, once they have got hold of you, refuse
to let go. (Only this morning I received an e-mail beseeching me "Kathryn,
why not let us help you find your Hughes ancestors?")

It was through the internet that I met Isobel Beeton. Not Isabella Beeton,
but her great-great niece. Isobel is a social services clerk from Chichester
who has been researching her family for the past year. She is not especially
interested in Isabella who, after all, is no Beeton but only married to one.
Still, Isobel was named after Isabella and wanted to learn more. I found her
fingerprints all over the web. She was on the message boards of various
genealogical sites, sharing information with family historians, asking for
leads about the Beetons, passing on material which might be useful to
others. I e-mailed her, she e-mailed back. Soon we were doing it every day,
attaching scanned images of wills, certificates, photographs, not to mention
hypotheses, speculations and frustrations about various Beetons and their
ability to slip through our fingers. Isobel was a dab hand at the technical
side and told me how to do all kinds of tricks, including setting out a
professional-looking family tree using Word, instead of improvising with
pencil and ruler. 

The moment just before we finally met on Arundel station, I wanted to run
away. Surely the advantage of doing genealogy on the web was that you never
actually had to meet the other people involved? Why had I stepped from the
virtual world into the flesh-and-blood one? Isobel, however, was comfortable
with it because, as she explained, she had spent the last few months meeting
up with various Beetons. Second cousins, third cousins, steps, halves and
even adopted, anyone who was within a day's travel. Mostly they were lovely.
Isobel, a middle-aged woman who had run the gamut of life's usual
difficulties and disappointments, told me over lunch that it was only at
this stage in her life that she had developed a desire to reconstitute her
extended family. Her teenage children weren't interested, her partner only
half-so, but for her it had become a quest to fill out the picture of where,
and who, she had come from.

Genealogy is a sneaky business, though. Just when you have reconciled
yourself to it as a harmless, even honourable activity, followed by people
of humbling good sense and skill, along comes something new to trip you up.
Here's the thing. The practice of family history, in Britain and in the US,
is almost entirely dependent on the Mormon Church. Anyone who has located
their great-great grandfather in Newcastle has probably done so by using
something called the International Genealogical Index (IGI). It is an
extraordinary resource containing the births, marriages and some deaths of
725m dead people. The data is culled from church and state records drawn
from 110 countries. Britain is particularly well- covered, but even parts of
the Samoan Islands have been inputted-useful if your great uncle was a
stranded seaman who went native.

The IGI is managed by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City as a way of
keeping tabs on possible converts to their idiosyncratic faith. Their crazy
logic goes like this: anyone who died without having the opportunity to
become a Mormon needs to be given the chance to put things right. Otherwise
they face the prospect of an eternity spent sitting forlornly outside the
gates of Paradise, unable to get in. Mass post-mortem conversion won't do,
for some reason. In order for the mechanism to work, each dead individual
has to be identified by name and then presented personally with the Mormon
message by way of a "covenanting ceremony." Since the Mormons are
scrupulously polite, they do not bully the dead-who may well have been
Jewish or Muslim in their earthly existence-into accepting the covenant. It
is left up to each individual soul to decide.

In their keenness to identify as many potential post-mortem converts as
possible, the Mormons do sometimes get careless about details. Enthusiastic
volunteers are apt to send information culled from sloppy secondary reading.
Once it is in the system it is hard to weed out. Thus someone has entered
George Eliot, under her real name of Mary Ann Evans, as being born in
London, whereas it should be Warwickshire. As a result she is presumably
still languishing in the spirit world 120 years after her death, waiting for
a correctly addressed covenant.

Until recently I had withstood the temptation to tap in the names of my
ancestors to the IGI to see what happened. It seemed important to keep the
boundaries clear. I was a historian researching another person's life, not
someone who needed to concoct sentimental stories about her own. Then, one
day, I couldn't resist it. But there was nothing. No hits at all. At first I
thought it must be because my family's name is so common: if you have a
father from Wales called John Hughes then you can't expect results first
time. So I tried my mother's family-a bit fancier, well-known in a little
England duffery sort of way. Nothing. Everyone else who was consulting the
Index at the FRC had been hissing and punching the air as their ancestors
rolled up the screen in mocking profusion. I couldn't locate a single one.
For months I had avoided trying because it seemed elitist. Then I hadn't
because I feared that my family might turn out to be dull and dreary, more
puritans than cavaliers. But now, it transpired, it was worse than that. My
family was so insignificant that they didn't show up at all. The Mormons,
who make a point of extending their invitation to everyone, had decided that
my family weren't worth bothering with. We had missed out on heaven, just as
we had missed out on everything else.

Kathryn Hughes is a contributing editor to Prospect

Prospect/May 2002

Source: http://prospect-magazine.co.uk