"I prefer dead relatives "
Historians may sneer at amateur genealogists, but their work is compelling
by KATHRYN HUGHES (Excerpted from ‘The Guardian’, November 30)
One of the more convenient side-effects of the explosion of interest in family history is that you need never again be stumped for what to give your nearest and dearest for Christmas. Instead of a lacklustre pair of socks or bottle of whisky, what could be more thrilling than a voucher that entitles the grateful recipient to extended access to the online version of the 1901 census?
For we are all historians now, chroniclers not so much of big events like the 1832 reform bill but of what year Auntie Joan went into service, or why Great-Grandfather Billy had to marry only five months before his eldest was born. Our heads are full not of kings and queens but of the housemaids, grocers and sheep stealers whose shreds of DNA make up who we feel ourselves to be today.
You see this new breed of historian every time you enter a local record office on the outskirts of a county town: hunched over microfiche, pencil in hand (Biros count as lethal weapons), in search of whiskery ancestors who share not just a name but, it emerges, green eyes, a temper, a propensity to a weak chest. What these amateur genealogists gain is a fuller, and certainly longer, sense of their own self, one that didn’t start with their birth, but in another century, and often another place entirely...
All of which raises the question: why are dead relatives so much more fascinating than live ones? Come Christmas it will be more inviting to slip upstairs after lunch, log on to
Ancestry.com and go in search of Great Aunt Enid than it will be to sit with her daughter, Aunt Sue. Sue makes sarky comments about your cooking, hogs the remote and always turns the conversation back to herself. Enid, by contrast, is teasingly elusive...
(The) dead do not mind about seeming respectable. They do not even care whether you like them. And perhaps, most important of all, they will not complain when you decide that it’s time for them to go back in their box.
