Since my previous post, I’ve been immersed in trying to sort out the paper trail of my family tree again. As many of my ancestors were labourers of one kind or another, with one or two in skilled trades (cabinet maker, painter and decorator) or mariners, this means most lines hit a practical stop in the early 19th century (mid 18th century in the case of ‘Burdon,’ who were miners then colliery engine men). This is because civil registration and census data run out in the early 19th century and, for English and Welsh ancestors at least, one is subject to the whims of surviving parish registration and other sundry records. Scottish records are somewhat more organised, though, again, practical issues of survival of records come into play. As I have ancestors from Ireland and the Isle of Man, further complexities arise.
In many ways, this makes the DNA stuff largely irrelevant. Even allowing for the chance element of what admixture is passed from parents to children, it is still an aspect of a problem that is familiar to anyone who has tried to draw conclusions from two different datasets created for different purposes using different standards. In an ideal world, the information from both should be congruent and complementary, but we are not in an ideal world. In one sense the DNA doesn’t lie, but it is also a contingent truth for recent generations, and largely useless without paper evidence to make sense of it, unless you are asking very specific questions, which consumer DNA tests don’t.
But there’s also a problem with the paper trail. In a first draft of a family tree, one is inclined to take the paper trail at face value, particularly as regards the identity of a child’s father and siblings. This continues to be so unless some other evidence comes along to cast doubt on things. And it may be true that the named ‘father’ is the father for all social purposes, and believes the information to be genuine. But in the end it is still just a name on paper. I’m not casting a slur on women, by the way, just noting that until very recently, determination of parentage by scientific means was practically and financially infeasible for the average person.
There were also deliberate deceits that were too frequent to be random, and look to me like tacitly accepted ways of addressing social stigma, such as illegitmate grandchildren appearing on censuses as the children of the grandparents.
I’ve been pondering this because in one of my family lines I’ve encountered two, possibly three, ‘illegitimacies’ which disrupt the paper trail. Across all of my lines, there are plenty of other examples of children born well within 9 months of marriage. In the latter case, I have no particular reason to doubt that the social fathers were also the biological fathers, but neither have I any reason to think that the mothers were not as human as the rest of us.
That makes the family tree thing a social construct.
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