If you have young children, you will know that you experience roughly 65 questions per day. Many, including: “Why do elephants have big ears?” can be answered in a heartbeat. Others such as: “Why is the sea salty?” need Google. Some, you just have to say: “I have no idea.” The latter comes sporadically, like it did last week.
“Daddy, what was the name of my great-great-grandad?” my daughter asked. I paused to think. “I have no clue. Let me phone your grandad to ask.”
Grandad (my dad) gave me the name I was looking for. He didn’t know much else because it was so long ago. He was so young; he can barely picture his ancestor’s face.
I’ve always wondered about where my family had come from. I have picked up the odd detail here and there from small anecdotes about my father growing up in a northern village in India, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes. I’ve thought about my background many times, but then thought I’ll get around to finding out more tomorrow. If I had known more about my heritage, would I have turned out to be a different person? More well-rounded?
I’ve finally figured out why I’ve put it off so many times. Apart from sketchy tales narrated by my parents, I just didn’t know where to start. I did go to India in 2005 to find my roots, but it didn’t amount to much. I was a naive twentysomething, travelling with a backpack and enough mosquito repellent for the whole population of Delhi. Besides, have you seen Who Do You Think You Are? The amount of research to get anywhere seems to require months of planning, travelling and – I assumed – a huge budget. But I was wrong. It’s much easier than I thought with Ancestry.
I started painting a family tree as soon as I got back and have been filling out the blanks for the past 14 years. I intend to get further than I have and not put it off until tomorrow. And given the fact that my offspring keep pestering me about their background, I’d better get cracking.
My wife has been even more successful in finding out about her past. My father-in-law has in his possession a handwritten journal in Gujarati, penned by his father. When it was left with the family many decades ago, the other grandad spent months typing up the pages and translating it into English for the new generation to read about their roots.
I showed my daughter the diary extracts detailing her great-grandad’s journey from India to Kenya on a steamship that by today’s standards wouldn’t be deemed good enough to sail in a pond, let alone the sea – she listened with her eyes wide open, jaw on the floor and her mind buzzing. The family names, the stories of his upbringing and the hardships he encountered tripled the child questions quota that week.
From being orphaned at the age of 13, trying to raise money for an education, to travelling for days until he arrived in Kenya with hardly any money may sound horrifying to me and you, but in a nine-year-old’s world this is the definition of a brave adventure. Here is someone who is part of her flesh and blood trying to make something from absolutely nothing. What my daughter was reading was an inspiration, and she was so happy to be part of his history.
Having children has made me realise why it’s so important to know who you are and where you fit into society. From a wellbeing perspective, it increases understanding of our own identity and place in the world.
Psychologists believe there are emotional benefits for children in knowing about their family history. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to believe this. Knowing your past gives you a sense of belonging, which is why I can’t wait to delve into my family history and share my findings with my daughter.
Experience: ‘I drew an enormous family tree on brown parcel paper’
When Viv Nunn decided to show her young grandchildren, Charles and Sienna, how families evolve, she started with a drawing.
“I drew an enormous family tree on brown parcel paper. I printed out photographs and stuck them in appropriate places on the family tree. There were pictures of [the children] and their cousins, and then pictures of their mum and dad. It was a case of building up the family,” she says.
Sienna and Charles were fascinated about just how many old people came before them. “For instance, I found a great-grandmother who had been born in Leicester and who frequently travelled to Gran Canaria in the 1920s.” Her photograph was added to the tree.
Not only educational and entertaining, building the family tree also helped Charles and Sienna deal with recent bereavement. “They’d lost their other Nana, their dad’s mum, and then soon after her son [their uncle] died, aged 37,” she says.
Their father Adam’s parents split up when he was young, and he was not in touch with his own father. He also knew very little about his own mother’s past. But Nunn was able to use her interest in genealogy to help her grandchildren deal with their loss.
Now aged nine and six, respectively, Charles and Sienna have benefited emotionally in different ways. Sienna was interested in knowing how people were related to each other, so Nunn explained to Sienna that while Rebecca (Nunn’s daughter) was Sienna’s mummy, she (Nunn) was Rebecca’s mummy, another woman was Nunn’s mummy, and so on.
Charles took the paper family tree to school and showed his classmates what his grandmother had discovered. He was especially interested in knowing what his ancestors did for a living. The family tree also helped him come to terms with bereavements. “He understood that life is transient,” says Nunn. “Most of the people on family trees are dead. It made Charles feel that death is normal.”
“[The children] were interested in my granddad,” says Nunn. “When my mum was born in 1927, he was a chauffeur, but by the 1930s he was driving buses. They had been to London and liked the idea of someone who drove a red bus.
“They were sometimes in the workhouse; they were very poor,” she says. The shame and hardship of the workhouse was something the children already knew about. “They had seen the film Oliver!, and it brought to reality the lives people before them had.”
Nunn’s paternal side were grocers and greengrocers, also from London. “We went back just beyond my great-grandparents. Both sides of my family came from Northamptonshire, around the villages where we live now. I was surprised about this myself,” says Nunn.
The children were particularly interested in the photographs Nunn found had been uploaded to Ancestry.
“I have a lot of photos of my own family, but nothing further back than my own parents,” she says. But Ancestry had other, older photographs that she had never seen before. “I found my grandparents and great-grandparents on [another relative’s] family tree. There was a lady in nurse’s uniform from the 1920s. There was another of an elderly gentleman working as a labourer. That photograph was from 1900. I don’t think the children realised that there were photographs so old.”
Some names have been changed to protect identities.
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