Homeopathic Ancestry

The face of hard times: my great-grandmother Mary Mabbitt,

listed here as receiving "parish relief" as a pauper family in 1906.

I've been thinking about the past a lot recently. Not so much my own personal past (although that does inevitably acquire prominence as one gets older) as the historical past, and in particular those dark but densely-populated stretches of the 19th century where most of our family histories lie. This is territory I've covered before (for example here), but I've been helping a friend with his family-tree researches, and it's remarkable how familiar so much of the ground has been. True, we come from very similar working-class backgrounds, but then, don't we all? Any trawl through the records of the 19th century will reveal how the general prosperity of the later 20th century is built on the compacted foundations of generation upon generation of hard grind and poverty.

One of the great insights of pursuing "family history" (a rather inflated term for the dogged pursuit of the paper-trail one's DNA has left, or failed to leave, in the bureaucracies of church and state) is to discover how very quickly you leave behind a familiar world of electric light, cars, fridges, and free schooling, and enter a crowded, dark, damp, unhappy world of struggle and short lives, where births, marriages, and deaths were signed off with a wavering "X": the "mark" of some illiterate forebear. The censuses show large families sharing small houses with other large families. Children vanish from the records, presumed dead, living with relatives, or in service somewhere. Widows serially marry men who die far too young, creating rival tribes of siblings. Families constantly split, like amoebas, into parallel strands of cousins, each bearing the same cluster of names, occupations, and ages, often living close nearby, making it impossible to tell one Henry or Hannah from another. Illegitimacy, and occupations and living arrangements that fell outside the law or the state's ability to categorise them would be glossed over with lies and euphemisms. Surprisingly often, people didn't really know how old they were, with the estimate varying, sometimes wildly (or perhaps wilfully) between each census and the various other required forms of certification.

The other day I was looking through our family photographs with my daughter, and was struck by the self-evident truth that her eight great-grandparents – just three of them familiar to me and all unknown to her – were born into a world that had yet to see cars, aeroplanes, electric lighting, or indeed any of the conveniences of modern life. It was no wonder I found them so hard to talk to: by the time they were the age I am now, which would have been around the mid-to-late 1950s, they were probably in a permanent state of PTSD, their once-familiar planet having been invaded and taken over by an alien species. I don't think many grandparents today have that problem, perhaps because rapid change is a condition we have come to expect and, to an extent, enjoy.  The pursuit of family history itself, once a time-consuming and expensive slog through scattered archives and graveyards, has become an almost trivial matter, carried out by ordinary people from the comfort of home on a machine and over a network that are far beyond the imaginings of even their most recent ancestors. It takes an act of true contrarian political will to reject the conveniences of globalised modern life, from out-of-season vegetables to dirt-cheap flights, on the grounds that their real price is too high. A price that is being paid by other families, in other parts of the world, where "modern life" as we understand it has yet to arrive.

I suppose the other main lesson of family history is the simple maths of the geometric progression of reproduction: every direct ancestral generation of every individual doubles in size. To which can be added siblings, cousins, and multiple marriages, although illegitimacy – far more common than we might think [1] – does tend to truncate some branches, genealogically if not genetically. Given that in the UK official registration of births, marriages, and deaths goes back to 1837 (and parish records much further), a child born today could reasonably expect to trace a family tree going back at least seven or eight, possibly even nine or ten generations. That's an awful lot of individuals to track down who have made a direct contribution to a single child's genetic pool; well over 1000, in a family with a conscientious attitude towards registration with officialdom. And yet, obviously, the further back you go, the more homeopathic is the contribution of any one individual. So, now that we're aware of the direct inheritance of "Y Chromosome" and "mitochondrial DNA" from male and female lines respectively, a lot of people choose to trace just those two direct lines of descent. But that is still a lot of work, and not so cheap if you do the thing properly, and buy a full suite of B/M/D certificates for each individual. It is also a lot of different sets of historical circumstances to take into account, even over a mere 180 years.

That last is, in many ways, the key. The old debate about "nature versus nurture" is always relevant. You don't acquire attitudes and behaviour from your genes, as far as anyone knows, although you may inherit certain aptitudes and predispositions. You acquire your attitudes and behaviour from the environment in which you grow up, which in turn is heavily influenced, positively or negatively, by the environments in which your parents and grandparents grew up. What is missing, in most family trees, is any sense of what sort of people your ancestors were and what sort of world they inhabited. You may have identified an individual living in 1841 with some precision, but probably only have the vaguest, most generic idea of the things that truly matter. What clothes did they wear? What food did they eat? Were they kind or cruel, churchgoers or notorious scofflaws, crippled by hard manual labour or people of private means? What did that street look like in 1841? Was it a hive of respectable conformity or a thieve's rookery? More research needed.

My own investigations illustrate this. On one side, I can trace my direct male line to a shepherd in Scotland's Lammermuir Hills, living in the late 18th century (Scottish records really are superb). It was only when I sat back, having succeeded in following this dry paper-trail, that I thought, "Holy shit, this guy is a contemporary of Robert Burns and Robert Adam, and his grandfather may well have been at Culloden". But I doubt very much that this romantically remote personage has had any influence at all on who I am [2]. On the other side, my maternal grandfather was illegitimate, the child of an unknown father and a woman who abandoned him into a Liverpool foundlings institution, lying about her name, age, and marital status on every official record, thus rendering herself invisible to posterity. In other words, an entire quarter of my genetic makeup is completely unknown and untraceable. But I'm pretty sure that my grandfather's experience of growing up without parents in the care of a late Victorian Poor Law Union, followed by service in WW1, had a profound effect on him, which will in turn have had a similarly profound effect on my mother. Certainly, it may explain why the taciturn old devil used to toss worms at me when gardening, which he knew I hated. "Tough love" would be the charitable interpretation, I suppose. Nature may deal the cards, but nurture plays the hand.

"Look, Ma! Posh folk!"

Queen Mary visiting shipyard workers, Sunderland, 1917

Tyne & Wear Museum & Archive (TWAM ref. DS.DOX/6/14/1/4)

1. I was impressed and quite surprised to learn recently that George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, the great art collector and patron of Turner, Constable, and others, filled Petworth House not only with art but also with over FORTY illegitimate children.
2. Although on a visit last year to a friend's smallholding near Inverness, I did discover a certain affinity with handling sheep. So who knows?