About two months ago, somebody on Tumblr posted a tag game about what people’s great grandfathers did for a living – I knew that two had been farmers and that one had been in the RAF, but I didn’t know about the other one, and on a whim, I started building my family tree again.
I did a course on how to do it when I was fifteen or so – nearly fifteen years ago now! – at my local library, and I’m a lot better at collating information and data, as well as having a far greater attention span, than I did back then, and I got really into it and spent all night doing it…
And then several more nights.
And then several more.
I have now done far more work on my family tree than I ever have in the past, and it has been great fun so far – I know now that better than being an itinerant father, one of my great grandfathers was also a petty criminal who got done for stuff like nicking bicycles; my Grandad Bill who was in the RAF was an airfield mechanic, and later on was in a few social clubs with other ex-RAF men, including in their choir; and the other grandad worked in a steel and tinplate plant for most of his life, and I believe later worked at the water board, which is where my grandfather later worked.
I will almost certainly be posting in more detail about some of my more interesting relatives and genealogical details the longer I work on the tree – I’ve been musing a lot on how I want to approach writing about them, because I’m not really a very good academic or historical writer, but I don’t think I would feel right fictionalising the biographical details and presenting them in prose form. I think what I will do where I can is take a multimedia approach and have newspaper clippings and records included and will fill in the gaps in simpler language, which should be fun!
I am having a lot of fun with this for its own sake – I very much enjoy that it’s a hobby that involves a lot of looking at historical records, comparing and contrasting data and trying to solve puzzles, track people through different addresses and locations, find their skill sets or their passions, who they married and who they held relationships with, where they worked or spent their time, etc.
The websites are a lot easier to use than they were when I was a kid, with more records having been digitised and consolidated, and with a lot more search options; I also picked up a subscription to Newspapers.com as part of my Ancestry membership, and so I’ve been searching through old newspaper records for relevant info to certain family members, which is great fun.
Several members of my closer family have worked as town or county councillors, so it’s been really fun looking at newspaper records not just for obituaries or wedding announcements, but also for beef and drama that family members got involved with in the 1970s particularly, the sort of petty silliness that you see in basically any local government, alongside really nice things.
My grandmother did her student nursing at a Norah Fry hospital in Shepton Mallet, where she grew up, which I know because she was given an award as a promising new nurse and that was in the paper; and then later on, I was able to see newspaper articles about her stepfather, my great grandad Ken, pushing for the hospital to be refurbished and done up, which was great.
There are obviously fewer public records for closer family members of mine than the ones that go further back, so it’s not all about comparing family stories and anecdotes to what records I can find – going further back, it’s more about being able to see what led certain family members to live and be where they ended up, what jobs they had, etc.
Stories about my great uncle Mervyn, who died before I was born, have kind of shaped a lot of my awareness of my grandfather’s childhood – he grew up with him and his siblings getting a lot of things from California, where Uncle Mervyn – Thomas M. Greer – went to live with his wife, Bethel Coloneus, after they got married. The Coloneuses are interesting in themselves, were all big into their church, and one of them was a famous cornettist who appears in loads of advertisements for cornets – they called him “the Monk”, I’m guessing because he came from a family of intensely dedicated Presbyterians, many of whom were either reverends themselves or were musicians within their church structure.
I didn’t really get that far in my family tree research when I was younger – I got stuck on the more common names like Greer in Northern Ireland and then Evans and Williams in South Wales, but I find it much easier now to find isolated details and compare tracks to do the detective work and figure out who’s who and why and where.
Ancestry isn’t perfect, by any means – it regularly shows me other people’s family trees that may or may not actually be good and well-researched, and it has some annoying AI features. It had a button to “clean up” old photographs, which ten years ago would normally have just adjusted contrast and smoothed some details as an automated process. It wouldn’t have given greater accuracy, necessarily, but it might have been helpful to make something look a bit more aesthetically pleasing and a little less smutty and pixelated – if you press that button now, it gives everybody horrible little button noses and scary blue eyes and yassified features in line with the other AI-generated nonsense, which is a big shame.
Still, it’s very fun and satisfying to do, especially as a hobby that I can do indoors and play with late at night, and is engaging and satisfying but feels a bit more productive than replaying a videogame I’ve played before.
In the UK, census records and a few other public records are only made publicly available after 100 years have passed and/or after the people mentioned are confirmed to be dead – the most recently available census records, which are generally the most valuable family records for genealogical research, are from the 1920 censuses and backwards. Censuses are taken every 10 years, and they’re some of the most valuable public records because of how much information they include: addresses, the names and ages of people who live in those addresses, their occupations, their relation to one another, and obviously you can even look at their neighbours!
This bars census records taken in Northern Ireland – the IRA bombed out one of the records offices and a lot of the results and stats from the 1920s are unfortunately lost, so when you’re tracking records in the north of the island, in the North or Republic, a lot of the time you have to rely more on church records, and those are obviously less likely to be digitised and might be more complex to access.
To be honest, in a lot of these islands – in the Republic of Ireland, especially in the midlands and the southern coasts; in a lot of Scotland, again, especially the islands and the mountains; and in good swathes of Wales, public record-keeping is obviously very imperfect. If the people you’re looking for didn’t speak English or had it as a second or third language, the records can be off; a lot of the time people might misspell things or get digits wrong, mix people up, or just not give enough of a fuck to be accurate, especially in the context of census takers or other public officers who are collating huge amounts of data at once; you have to truck with people’s handwriting and limited literacy, et cetera, et cetera.
That’s hardly a unique issue, though – I’ve been at once impressed and horrified at how incredibly detailed US American public records are and how much information they harvest even in the 1800s compared to the British ones taken at the same time. Army records are more detailed, there’s more stuff attached to people’s birth and burial records, census records include race and religion and country of origin… but obviously, those latter aspects are included because of the fucking racism in the country, which has a history of being organised in US governmental policy from the out, because of the need to oppress and keep tight track of natives and indigenous peoples, the obsession with tracking the “right sorts” of immigrants, and then later on obviously marginalising Black Americans, especially ex-slaves and their descendants.
In the process of building my tree and collating different public records, I learned about a website I wasn’t familiar with before, which is FindAGrave.
The website is older than I am, which is always fun – it’s basically a site where people can collate burial records and photographs of existing gravestones, monuments, and other memorials. Headstones might often include all sorts of unexpected details – birthdays, birth places and places of death, military rankings or other titles, etc, and obviously family members will often be interred together, either under the same monument or with headstones close to one another.
I’ve requested a few photographs of graves where ancestors are buried, especially in other parts of England and Wales than where I am now, and I’ve started taking photographs of graves and memorials in cemeteries closer to where I am as a sort of fair trade, but also… It’s really fun, and I’m really enjoying it.
There’s a defunct cemetery near to us that used to belong to a Catholic Church, and when the church was closed down and demolished, the land was sold off – the stones were all cleared and it’s now being used as horse pasture, but a gay cripple or someone resembling such a man might have scaled the gate using his cane and his telescopic stool in order to take photographs of the surviving memorial stones that had been lined up against the wall but hadn’t been smashed.
Other than that, I’ve been visiting a few older cemeteries in Leeds and Bradford – people can request photographs of graves, but what I tend to do is walk up and down and just photograph as many graves as I can, and then transcribe them all en masse.
You get to see the evolution of British memorials from the 1700s through to the early 1800s, where the name of the game is often about size and the pure impact of stone coffins or slabs, or have simpler gothic details and bits of filigree – you definitely see more beauty and detail on monuments that are inside church walls and are part of their tiles or wall bricks, etc, but beauty isn’t absent from these older memorials.
When you see graves from the mid-1800s through to the 1910s, though, you get to see the whole gamut of Victorian sensibilities reflected in headstone selection, and a lot of these things are gloriously ornate – there’s lots of rich symbolism, all kinds of fun designs and random bits of aesthetic detail and beautification, and more visible poetry, which rocks. There’s angels, urns skulls and skeletons, flowers and ivy, veils and curtains, various religious iconography, and given Egyptomania at the time, there’s also crazy Orientalism and other weird fetishism in ornate and flashy ways.
And then you get to the 1920s through the 1970s, and everything is kinda ugly, until you get to the 80s and 90s and a lot of headstones stay ugly, but in a different and more creative way than the straightforward, minimalist ugliness of a headstone from the 1950s.
Still, even the ugly graves can be fun – or funny, or sad, or poetic, will have jokes or little details on, just bits of humanity inherent to them. You wanna see the real fucking wonder of looking at graves?
PROPRIETOR OF THE ORIGINAL MARIONETTES!?
Now that is fucking celebrity.
I don’t do very well with aimless walking even in places that I enjoy being – I really like cemeteries and graveyards because, like I said, they show this real insight into humanity over time, and especially artistic sensibilities, how wealth was shown or memorialised, what was seen as beautiful or most appropriate to a memorial, but even though I do really enjoy them I struggle with the idea of just taking a walk around one without a specific goal in mind.
Using FindAGrave and basically ticking off all the graves I can see or read makes me more engaged with the journey around, the same as looking for plants and wildflowers or birds and other fauna does when I’m walking, and it’s nice to also know it might be useful for other people’s research and record-keeping.
They’re not disconnected, either – we went to St George’s Fields in Leeds the other week and I saw a mistle thrush for the first time, as well as seeing a bunch of other birds and about a million baby rabbits. Cemeteries are often clearly cultivated public spaces with lots of trees and plants, much like public parks, so they’re a good place to birdwatch!
I obviously already write a few gravediggers and death merchants, but you can probably expect more soon, as you can imagine.
I plan to write some more blog posts about this hobby as well as writing a bit more about geneaology – I want to write a bit about Victorian grave design and how much different stones cost an individual or a family, as well as to write about recognising different symbols and even specific stone designs, as well as materials.
(If you’ve been waiting for more adventures in fudge or more recipes, you will probably be waiting until the weather in England is no longer trying to broil me in my own skin, alas. <3)
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