On Top of the Bare Hill

Mar 27, 2024 | Family Tree, Legs!, Writing

So, that was March then, marked mainly by the blossoming of my fruit trees.

It has been an odd month. For a start, I haven’t been running at all and withdrew from two events I’d booked onto – no Edinburgh half marathon for me this year. Nor have I been to the gym. My left knee was playing up in late February and I decided to give it a complete rest apart from walking. As of this afternoon that appears to have done the trick (I think it was probably a muscular problem rather than a knee problem,) but time will tell. You might think that has given me plenty of free time to write, but instead I’ve made a start on the long task of putting my accumulated family tree research notes into order. That means systematically editing what I have and identifying the areas where more needs to be done.

My aim is to ensure that I have a solid base of evidence of people and timelines and then to contextualise that within social history using as much as I can determine about my ancestors’ lives as a framework. Predominantly, their lives in C19 and earlier involved coal and ironstone mining, the railways, lace and silk manufacture and agricultural labour. For the most part I have my main family lines back to around 1800 with reasonable certainty and sometimes before that with less clarity.

The last few days have mainly been given over to trying to figure out a mess of C19 illegitimacy and bigamy in Nottingham and Bakewell; there’s nothing like family history to reveal the degree to which we are a mongrel breed – a good thing: diversity is strength.

Researching and editing engages a different part of the brain to writing fiction but also acts as a general refresher for the subconscious. I think we all find that one way to generate ideas about something is to concentrate on something else entirely. My plan was to have some stories out this year, but they may slip into 2025 and I’m comfortable with that.

I have a couple of potential blog posts in the offing about my return to genealogy but I’m letting them simmer for a while.