A trip to a sports physiotherapist has established what seems to be going on with my left knee. After a systematic assessment and rejection of possible causes of the problem, he reckons it’s down to wear and tear on the meniscus, possibly just because of aging. The upshot is that I can go back into the gym when I want, do as much upper-body resistance as I feel inclined, and also any cardio work except any running on the treadmill. In addition, I have some specific exercises designed to strengthen the knee. The downside is that, particularly at my age, it may be some time before I can consider running again, although he is reasonably confident that the time will come when I can.
Cheese:
Although I haven’t had my annual check yet, the general news is that my HbA1c remains in the normal range and therefore my diabetes remains in remission. This is despite my weight going up by around 2.5 kilograms based on this time last year. A period of weight-loss is called for, something that might be helped by getting back into the gym and/or swimming or possibly also by foregoing my taste for Stilton for a while. A more considered comment is in my latest Substack post linked here:
Progress continues to be made in working through some family lines, though the C19 Nottinghamshire family continues to be awkward. One of the problems is the divergence between social history and apparent genetic history and this is compounded by the way Ancestry suggests genetic matches.
The theory is that Ancestry (a) finds a genetic match (b) compares family trees to find common ancestors and (c) suggests a match. In principal this should work well, and a lot of the time it does. Where it gets less helpful is when either there is an error in one of the family trees it compares or where there is a problem with the underlying records from which people derive family trees – for example if a family are lying to officialdom or otherwise covering over the traces of illegitimacy or other shenanigans – which is what I continually encounter.
On this point, it is worth saying that the myth of ‘Victorian morality’ does not survive first contact with family history research. What is far more interesting to me are the many accepted ways that families would formally or informally absorb issues – for example an older couple might declare an illegitimate grandchild as one of their own children to census enumerators. We cannot know for sure in many (or most) cases the circumstances in which illegitimate (a term I dislike) children might be conceived – it might be teenage passion, it might be false promises from a bloke who then runs away. As the great Lizzie Higgins sang (What AVoice),
When my apron it hung low
My true love followed through frost and snow.
But now my apron is tae ma chin;
He passes me by and he’ll ne’er speir in.
It’s up and doon yon white hoose brae,
He’s called a strange girlie to his knee
An he’s telt her a tale that he’s once told me.
Oh I wish, I wish, oh I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again.
But a maid again I will never be
’Til a apple it grows on a orange tree.
However, the child might also come from rape or other coercion or incest. In the latter case, family shame and trauma would also lead to disguising the truth. Two centuries later, after the individuals are long gone, DNA technology throws up discrepancies in the established narrative.
It’s also worth noting that women in urban areas noted for poverty, such as Nottingham, might well (and often did if offical reports are to be believed) turn to sex work to make ends meet. I’m not saying that this was the case for any of my ancestors, simply that it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility.
I note with pleasure that people sharing the same name as my forebears (Faulks/Fawkes) in a small village in Nottinghamshire were noted for their skill in making Stilton, which explains a lot.
A lot has changed since my first attempts at figuring out our family history in the 1990s; returning to it, I find the two biggest changes are the quantity of primary material now available online and the emergence of genealogy DNA products. Gone are the days of ordering copies of microfiche and trying to find a machine to read them with, or looking up microfiche in libraries, or engaging researchers for what are now the most basic of lookups. (No criticism of researchers and professional genealogists, by the way, just that their role is now more specialist.)
I’ll leave genealogical DNA testing for another post: today I want to reflect on online research.
The availability of records online is a very good thing, notwithstanding the commercial gatekeeping that attaches to it. It has also raised its own problems. Sites like Ancestry and Familysearch allow one both to research and to upload one’s own family tree and this is unquestionably valuable, but also problematic.
Back in the day, it was a known issue that the International Genealogical Index was an important resource but the associated pedigrees were often names and records jigsawed together and glued up with wishful thinking. The same is true with Ancestry and the like: I’ve found a lot of family trees there recently which do not accord with my reading of the surviving records. Usually, this has been because the researcher has looked at headline indices but not taken the time to dig deeper into the primary sources, for example by not reading through a register of baptisms where it has been scanned. It is a habit that has stayed with me since university days – always read the primary sources.
That isn’t to say, of course, that my reading of the records is better, just that one has to be careful and thoughtful in drawing conclusions where records are scant or ambiguous. There’s an old story about a sociologist, a mathematician and a logician who are travelling to Scotland. Just across the border, they notice a black sheep on a hillside. ‘Look,’ says the sociologist. ‘Scottish sheep are black.’ ‘Oh no, no, no,’ replies the mathematician. ‘All you can justifiably say is that there is one black sheep in Scotland.’ ‘You’re both wrong,’ says the logician. ‘The true observation is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland which has at least one black side.’
I tend towards the logician in my reading of official records, albeit that there are times when you have to make a judgement on whether something is a reasonable (provisional) conclusion notwithstanding apparent errors – our ancestors were quite capable of telling outright untruths or partial truths to census enumerators, for example, and census enumerators made mistakes. Wherever possible I’m looking for corroboration of some kind. That’s a counsel of perfection, of course, but it’s a good operating principle.
There is also something strange about the search experience of the ‘big three’ sites here in the UK – Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search: sometimes very small changes in search parameters make very large differences in outcomes – often the difference between finding something and not finding it. Several times I’ve been unable to find records again that I know exist because I’ve already looked at them and jotted down details I want to revisit and confirm. As a user who has had some experience with implementing IT in my work life, that suggests to me that there are problems with the databases, the data schemas or the search algorithms (or all three). Databases of names are much more complex than generally understood, and that is compounded when one is researching a time before spellings became homogenised and when names were recorded phonetically by curates who were unfamiliar with dialect (and changed with the installation of a new curate). Even allowing for that, however, something is off with those sites.
On the plus side, something that hasn’t changed is the kindness and willingness of other people to help where they have expertise to offer. Message boards and Facebook are really good for networking with other researchers and getting pointers to things one has missed or of which one was unaware. In fact, as someone who is deeply sceptical about Facebook, my experience of genealogical interest groups to date has been so positive that it has become my primary use case for the site.
Also just as relevant after all these years is the unsettling oddity of recording a life by reference to formal records without any personal context. What were my ancestors doing between censuses? Did they make the best that they could of their lives or did they experience them as oppressively shitty? Did they have good lives? Most of the time we will never know, but attempting to find answers to these in the absence, usually, of written records such as diaries, is the difference between compiling a family tree and creating a family history, and I’m here for the latter in the long run.
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.
I fell into a family tree shaped hole today, picking up my notes from a year ago to see if I can make sense of them. what I really need to do, I suspect is to go old-school and lay things out over the floor with bits of thread linking them or something. I know I can do that with software, but there’s something about having it laid out in front of you that’s helpful.
The focus is on my mum’s side of the family which has some knotty growth to untangle. I suggested to my sister that, if I can get enough information (and photographs) I’ll try and put something together that I could circulate in draft then maybe self-publish. I think that will take a while, though. All of these projects depend on the quality of the records and indices and the willingness of ancestors to play ball. To make it work, it helps to be able to build pen-portraits of people. That one of my C19 ancestors on Dad’s side was invalided out of the Dragoons because he got too fat to sit on a horse is far more engaging than the dull facts of his birth, christening, marriage and death.
Having said that, I wonder what the cut-off date is for stories; at what point does the privacy of the subject fade sufficiently into the past to remove inhibitions from what I might write?
***
I took a walk earlier, ostensibly to buy some stamps and post a letter, but it extended somewhat. It was nice to be out in the sun, but the wind was bitter. I didn’t check in on twitter or the news headlines, but I did spot this, which is the most significant story of the day:
I woke this morning from a fever dream of walking down the Royal Mile in the sunshine, wandering in and out of used book and record shops, knowing the pubs are open for a swift pie and pint. I don’t know where these fantasies come from.
***
A year ago I was researching family history stuff. Despite having a lot of free time in the intervening months, I have pretty much done nothing about it since then. I remembered it today because I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to my sister and my niece talking about it, and about ways of getting more information in the form of gossip and stories. The problem I was stuck on when lockdown hit was:
My ancestor, James Morton, was born 24 April 1845 in Carrington Street, Parish of St. Peter’s, Nottingham. James was the illegitimate son of Ann Morton, who was the daughter of William Morton and Catherine Lane (m. Nottingham St Mary’s 16 February 1816).
James Morton is described as a cabinet maker, and had at least two children: George Lawrence Oliver Morton and Percy (James?) Morton. I am descended from George. According to the 1871 and 1881 census, and George LO Morton’s birth certificate, James was married to Elizabeth Faulkes (various spellings, ch. St Luke’s Hickling, Notts. 21 Jan 1850.) However, on the 1891 census James is said to be married to ‘Emma’. I’m pretty sure Emma was a widow, born Emma Mills and her later married name was Emma Jordan, though I haven’t traced this fully yet.
My problem: I can’t find any record of James actually marrying either Elizabeth or Emma, and I can’t find anything to indicate Elizabeth’s death between 1881 and 1891. So either there is a problem with the records and I just haven’t found what I’m looking for, or there were shenanigans. My money would be on shenanigans.
I ought to get back to that.
***
Music : another synthpop classic, from 1980. Martha and the Muffins : Echo Beach, one of many I associate with the jukebox in Potterrow Student Centre.
Back in another lifetime, in February, the only three entries here were about family tree research, something I haven’t thought about much since then. On 14 February (The Unicorn Hunt) I pondered, amongst other things, the relative meaninglessness of consumer DNA in the absence of records. A different perspective comes from a programme I listened to on BBC Sounds (available worldwide for a year, I think) by Sophia Smith Galer. In DNA And Me, she considers what happens when such a test produces an unexpected result, and what it means for questions of identity.
It’s just under half an hour long and is a good listen.
***
Aside from that, most of today has been spent grinding out 1000 words of fiction, or thereabouts. It’s been quite nice in the shed with the door and windows open: it’s been a bit too breezy to sit out, but the airflow around the desk was very pleasant. It also kept me awake: I have a habit of drifting off up there.
As I write this, the sky to the north is still clear and I’m wondering if it might be possible to see Comet Neowise tonight. To date it has been to low in the northern sky for us to see from here–although the point is moot since skies have been cloudy.It should be higher in the sky tonight, so fingers crossed.
Maybe the folks around about having parties in their gardens will have quietened down by then too. I can’t begrudge people having a fun time after the last few months, but I can still get grumpy about it 🙂
***
Music: two songs about comets, both effortlessly melodic and lyrical.
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