People Roaming the World
Where do I start? Here and now, I am sat in Yorkshire, seventy years old, fit but suffering from the pain of a hip replacement. I can remember my brother as formless presence in my two-year-old life, one hundred and eighty miles away. Though I have only a vague memory of my Grandma Morgan, I can imagine her being in born in Homestead, Allegheny County, across the Atlantic Ocean, around one hundred and thirty years ago. My Cumbrian aunt used to travel round with her grandma to relatives’ houses and picked up stories from a wide range of the previous generations. She in turn told me stories about those previous generations and also from her own time in Australia. My grandchildren are in Yorkshire and Wales and my step-grandchildren are in New Zealand. Some of those stories can pass further down the generations. How long is a life and what are its boundaries?
I don’t want to get spiritual or even sanctimonious about my, or anybody’s origins. I don’t believe in the importance of culture or roots, just in doing the best you can, in the here and now. I do believe in respecting the world around you and all the things in it, especially the ordinary and less spectacular, the overlooked. Perhaps that is why I am writing this? To draw attention to how ordinary it is to have complex origins, to draw attention to stories that have been passed on and to pass on some of my own.
From the late 1960’s on, in the UK, people suddenly started travelling overseas in greater numbers. Especially with the advent of cheaper air fares, people wanted to break away from the British seaside holiday. It was heralded as the democratization of overseas travel. But people have always travelled, whether they are poor or rich. Generally, the travelling has been with more purpose than just seeing the sights or catching the sun and warmth. Family festive gatherings when I was young usually included a phone call or two to Australia or Canada or the USA, where relatives or friends had set up new homes, but, in the manner of many migrants, often still clung to the old memories and ways. I can’t even remember who was being phoned and I didn’t have much interest in family as a child. A lot of my memories are to do with being embarrassed, by the strange great uncle, who had come all the way from Canada and made us bow our heads in prayer before a meal, or the grandad from the other end of the country, who repeated the same old snatches of song or seemingly meaningless verse or who later lay in the single bed next to mine saying his prayers. Later I realised that these were real people, who had lived lives beyond my imagination, made long and difficult journeys to lots of different places. They had listened to the tales of others who had been before them and decided to try it themselves. They were all sorts of people, none of them really privileged. Some were poor, some were better off. The better off ones who travelled were often second or third sons who would not inherit what little there was or they were women who were otherwise just expected to look after their relatives in some way. They were people who wanted to make their way but also perhaps to experience adventure.
Later, when I had my own family, I thought I should try to make sense of some of the names and memories to pass on to the next generation, but I couldn’t summon up enthusiasm for genealogy. When my mum died suddenly at sixty-nine, I realised that I would never be able to ask her questions about her past and family any more. Mum’s older sister had always been much more interested in that sort of thing than mum, so I asked her some questions and, as a result ended up with all her documentation and scribbled notes. She also passed on some bits and pieces, such as an ancient elephant hair bracelet, for me so give to my daughters. As the oldest boy on my dad’s side, I also ended up with various other bits and pieces from that history. Still, I couldn’t summon a great enthusiasm.
It turns out that I’m not the oldest surviving boy in the Scott line and I don’t believe in primogeniture or patrimony anyway. The irony is that the ‘Family Bible’ was passed to my Mum (not a Scott) by dad’s mum (not a Scott) because I was the oldest boy amongst here grandchildren. She in turn had the bible because she was the one looking after Joseph Scott before he died (in the ancient way of men expecting their daughters or their son’s wives to look after them in old age). The further irony is that the bible’s original owner was Sarah Whorwood (not a Scott) and it was just hijacked by someone to write the Scott line down. It has now gone to a good home, where an older Scott than me has had it rejuvenated.
When people undertake genealogy they often try to keep going until they find someone famous or rich or even Celtic or Viking or just otherwise different or exciting. My partner Ruth has a chart that takes one strand of her line back to Irish nobility. Of course it starts from her Granny, but then mostly ignores females, except when necessary to achieve the feat of finding noble blood. In some of the later stories I am having to trace backwards more often and I don’t want to just follow a particular name backwards. That makes it more difficult of course but it also makes it more even handed and nearer some kind of truth. I’m very pleased that, so far, I have not discovered anyone really rich or famous. They have mostly been the sort of people who actually do something in the world. They produce food or work with wood or metal or they care for people. Sometimes they teach others to do these things. Telling their stories seems worth doing.
What started me on the road to this project was when one day I was watching a friend perform in a mumming play in Sowerby Bridge, in Yorkshire, and the character of The Doctor, in an outfit covered in scissors and other medical instruments, repeated some of my grandad’s nonsense; ‘Now then Jack, get this down thee flick flack. Rise up and fight the devil again’. When I asked my dad, he confirmed that grandad had indeed performed in mumming plays and worn such a costume, in Barrow-in-Furness in the early 1900’s, though my dad wasn’t born at the time. I became aware that I now possessed a story about something that happened before my dad was born and that I could pass on, perhaps to my grandchildren, suddenly spanning great periods of time. I started paying more attention and wrote down what I could remember or piece together and passed it on. Understandably people were perhaps grateful, but, like me, not enthused.
Despite a reasonable academic understanding, I can never know how other people’s minds work and they mystify me daily. Mine seems to have quite a strong sense element, in that I can somehow ‘picture’ scenes, sounds or tastes and relate them to periods of my life. I can picture the Cumbrian village where my mum was born, both before and after the Co-op was closed and roughly how old I was the last time I went in there. I can here the cock crowing in the farmyard next door to the little cottage where mum was born. In a later memory, I feel like I can taste and smell the first, well made, cannelloni dish I had, when I was a student in Lancaster. I remember trying to recreate it and could probably have a go now, though I wouldn’t eat it because I’m vegetarian. I suddenly thought that maybe all this history would be less dry as a story that attempted capture some of those emotions, times, and places. I wonder if I can capture the sense of some ordinary history, to live on in someone else’s mind?
Such a task is endless. I very quickly ended up in the 17th century with 2 of 32 ggggrandparents. If you run forward from them you end up with a vast number of people, all of whom have their own stories. Some of them were part of a large family. Some of them were single farmers, whose relatives came to live with them or work for them. It is easy to side-line the ones who have no children, or who disappear from the puzzle, but they also had their own lives. My aunty Vi didn’t have kids and only married late in life. She was often grumpy and difficult, and she drank too much but she didn’t go to Grammar school because there wasn’t enough money, and started work in the Fever Hospital in Meathop, when she was 14, which left more money in the family, so my mother could go to the grammar school. After 13 years of being side-lined in nursing, because she didn’t go to grammar school, she emigrated to Australia, where she was treated more fairly. To get there she travelled by ship, including six days without seeing land, and wrote eloquent letters back to her parents all the way. Later she came back to the UK, probably to care for her ageing parents and to see me and Rob, and ended up as part of the young NHS. That is part of her and part of this story.
Vi’s story is also part of another element of this history, which is strong women. Necklaces from far shores and long ago mumming plays are romantic highlights of stories, but the thread is held together by women taking charge at key times. Unusually the men in my immediate life have far outlived the women, so I often didn’t get to know those women well. Writing this has made me aware of so many impressive women. I hope I can do them justice. I have come back to it repeatedly because I suddenly realised I had not paid enough attention to a sister or similar.
Having had some success with the reception of the first stories, I carried on and new stories gave me ideas for developing the richness of earlier tales as well. Getting the balance of fact, general history, and biography right in some of the stories gets more difficult, so I have left out much of the biographical detail. When others read the stories, they also add their own understanding and I am trying to alter things accordingly. As I write this, I am researching my second story based around the island of Ireland, but this time centred round Northern Ireland. It has made it clear how different the records can be and highlighted religion, class and prejudice as a strong strand underlying all these stories. Perhaps more than anywhere else, I get the sense of people, even now, re-writing the history to make it match their prejudices. I hope I can do that justice.
Having written the above about prejudice with some trepidation, I recently came across some Wales related and interesting historical references in Alis Hawkins’ two books; A Bitter Remedy and None so Blind. These two led me back to the family stories to add yet more context to what I had written.
I have always thought that evolution is badly described as ‘the survival of the fittest’, when it is just ‘the survival of those that happened to survive’. Similarly history has been described as the story of winners by those that won. The stories here are lightly embroidered recollections of recollections of those who wandered across the world, through a range of cultures, without really being noticed that much. They are part of a long history of complex human interactions that defy historical simplifications and connect directly with parallels in the life of today. Looking through the on-line records is difficult and confusing. Misspelt names and sudden disappearances make it hard to be certain about anything. My ageing brain doesn’t help, as each time I return, I’ve forgotten what I found previously. So, what follows are fictional tales based round real characters, places and events.
Use the drop down selections at the top of the page to view the histories.