Of my many lofty life goals (learning Italian, upholstering a chair, getting a cramp and not Googling “Am I dying?”) the least achievable is tracing my family tree. It’s futile for people like me – children of immigrants from countries that aren’t exactly known for their record-keeping – and me, especially.
Without historical documents, all I have to go on are my mother’s anecdotes. And she is what I’d call an unreliable source; her stories, like her recipes, are fantastic but lack specifics (“some salt”, “a bit of turmeric”, or the cryptic “cook it until it’s ready”).
But recently a document turned up – it was Mum’s college certificate, the one she received just before she arrived in England and left among other papers that “must be around here somewhere”. Now, she noticed something strange: the certificate listed her date of birth as though she were two years older.
Mum has her theories about it; that maybe the certificate is right (“How can you ever really know how old you are?” she muses aloud. Good thing I know how vehemently anti-drugs she is or I might ask her what she’s smoking). Or that her mother must have faked her age – something to do with gaming school admissions, because she was a believer in girls’ education. But I didn’t understand how that would work.
All we have is speculation. But in that speculation I learned some things – how deeply my late grandmother cared about women’s rights (perhaps enough to break the rules), and how my mum’s face comes to life when she recalls her. So even though I may never have dates of deaths, births and marriages, perhaps tracing my family tree – stoking the distorted memories – isn’t a waste. There are no facts in speculation, but there is truth if you look for it.
